There’s a great post over on Avinash Kaushik’s blog about how to measure the success of a blog – which entails much more than just measuring traffic. Avinash distils the measurement down to the following six items (slightly paraphrased by me):
- So what have you actually contributed (how much content have you created)?
- Is anyone consuming your blog’s content?
- Are they engaging in the conversation (are they contributing comments)?
- Are you making a dent in the world? (Are you standing out amongst the 70 million blogs on earth on this day?)
- Are you getting what you want out of it (money/friends/enemies/job offers/fan mail)?
- What is the blog costing you (in time as well as $)? Is it worth it?
Interesting to me amongst these are that, as well as measurements of content consumption and (primary) content creation, measuring the level of engagement (i.e. comments, trackbacks) from others is a key measure of a blog’s success.
As we at MSN look to help people monetize their Spaces blogs, this kind of measurement is going to be essential – for them, but also to us.
This is a thought-provoking article. If a website has a steadily increasing level of traffic and even repeate visitors, but few comments, how would this impact on your sense of web success? Of course, that would depend on your intentions. If your goal is simply to inspire and motivate others, you could be a great success and never really know the half of it! Have faith that you are reaching people and be content or, take it further via measurable techniques.
Liara,
Yes – I think it’s interesting that Avinash picks a number of user engagement metrics (including comments) as well as the more traditional traffic metrics.
As it should happen, this blog gets relatively few comments, despite its steadily increasing traffic. Interestingly for me, my feedburner stats (i.e. the use of my RSS feed) show a strong and consistent increase over the past few months, whilst my actual on-site traffic fluctuates – the trend is upwards but much more gently). I think most of my users read my content through RSS but then don’t feel the need to click through and leave a comment.