Most people probably remember former NBA superstars Karl Malone and John Stockton. Together this dynamic duo from the Utah Jazz immortalized the play called the pick-and-roll.
While I won't go into the details of the play I wanted to highlight that individually Malone and Stockton were awesome players, but when executing this play together their combination was lethal to the opposition.
Number of game wins and their two runs at the NBA championship is probably the best way to measure their team's success, but other stats like setting up other players with assists and the ability to get offensive charges also played a vital part in their victories.
The same goes for your blog. While you might think the Technorati rank and tops in Google results for a keyword or two is the end-all-be-all for your achievement, here are five other ways to measure the success of your business blog:
1. Reach
Let's start with the most common stat for any site or blog on the web - number of monthly visitors. This gives you a pretty good idea of your blog's reach. You might want to break this down further to see where people are coming from.
Another measure of reach is the number of keywords drawing traffic to your blog and also checking to see if those keywords are drawing more and more traffic over time.
2. Stickiness
While the number of subscribers is a good measure of reach, I like to think of it as the number of people who've opted-in to hear from you regularly - and thus is a measure of stickiness. How sticky is your blog?
3. Engagement
Engagment is about guaging how much people interact with you or measuring the level of dialog. Comments on your blog or in social media is a good way to measure engagement quantitatively.
One could go further and split the positive comments from negative comments to also get a qualitative measure of engagement.
4. Authority
Just like citations at the end of academic papers refer to important, authoritative works, in the same way inbound links are a good measure of authority for your blog and specific articles.
At the same time blog tweets or retweets or your brand mentions in relation to a particular blog article could be considered a good measure of authority.
You should be monitoring social media to capture the impact of influence of your blog on the community.
5. Conversion
At the end of the day what matters to most business is leads and customers. How can you justify so much time blogging if there is no concrete business result from that activity?
While all results don't need to be tangible, a good way to measure the fruit of your blogging efforts is track conversion, i.e. how many visitors your drove back to your site or product pages and ultimately how many leads you got from that.
The Takeaway for Business Boggers
Coming back to my basketball analogy I want to reinforce that while your website may be powerful like the Mailman at 6' 9" 250 lbs and you may have a blog that is nimble with fresh content like Stockton at 6' 1" 170 lbs, it is really the combination of the two together like the pick and roll that can really accelerate your business success.
Keep measuring important aspects of your blogging efforts and try and improve them. Aim high for that hoop and enjoy the success!
How are you measuring the success of your business blog? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
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