This is a guest post by Shamelle Perera from BetterBloggingWays.com
When starting out a new blog it can often be fairly frustrating experience. You put in a lot of effort but you might feel as you are not seeing results. Like anything worthwhile, building a solid and effective blog will take some time and hard work.
At the same time it’s important to know that the effort you are putting in is steering you in the right direction.
So how do you know you are on the right path to blogging stardom?
Here is a list of 7 things that tell you that your online efforts are on the right track, your optimization, content and marketing strategies are working and bearing fruit.
1. Increasing Traffic and Visitors
Traffic level is one of the most basic metrics of gauging your success online – a clear indicator that people are looking you up on search engines, and coming to your blog from Google, social mediums, directories and other sources.
Try comparing your blog’s traffic and page views to last month’s, last quarter’s or even with same time last year. If they’re up (and showing an upward trend), give yourself a pat on the back because you’re on the right track.
2. Growing Number of Subscribers
It is important to realize that subscribers are people who have voluntarily opted-in so that they can be informed when you put something up – which means that the content you’re putting up on your blog is valuable and high-quality.
It also means that you have successfully managed to make it easy for visitors to subscribe to your blog. Check your RSS count and the number of people subscribed to you via email.
An increasing number of subscriber-base would definitely mean that you are doing something right.
3. Increasing Number of Comments
If traffic is the heart and soul of a blog, comments are its lifeblood! To me, the number of real, thought-provoking comments that I get for a blog post I wrote, is a solid, concrete way of measuring its success.
When you initially start off, getting comments can be pretty hard. Even if you get decent amount of traffic on your blog – indeed, according to Nielsen’s statistics, only 1 in every 100 visitors actually makes an effort to leave you a comment! So don’t despair if you are not getting too many comments.
4. Low Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of people who landed on any given page of your blog, and left without browsing or going on any other page apart from the one that they landed on.
A low bounce rate is therefore essential, as it is a clear indicator that your blog is:
- Being found for the right, most relevant search terms or phrases (keywords/phrases)
- You’ve successfully been able to engage anyone who comes on your blog by providing valuable, quality, informative and interesting content and information
- Anyone who lands on your page is tempted to browse through your blog and read the various articles
- You’ve made navigation simple, and it is easy for people to go from your landing page.
5. Strong Social Presence
Having a strong presence in social media is just as important (if not more) as having large visitor-base, more subscribers or more engaged readers. The ability to be seen as an authority figure on social media – such as on Facebook or Twitter for instance – is essential. It could potentially allow you to drive in massive amounts of traffic to your blog from these mediums, and have your opinion counted and valued.
Facebook pages come with a comprehensive analytics suite built-in, which allow you to check subscriber count trends, engagement trends and the like. If your blog’s pages are getting more subscribers, and if you’ve been able to engage people on your Facebook page through comments, shares and likes, that brilliant because you have been able to establish a strong foothold in the social media – which you can leverage to drive inbound traffic to your blog.
6. Rising Number of Inbound Links
It is said that 95% of all SEO strategies and campaigns concentrate on link-building. The fact that your blog is getting inbound links is truly a massive achievement. It means that other are linking to your content – all of which translates into more traffic, more sales/revenue, and better search engine rankings/higher SERPs.
Above all, it means that you are now providing high-quality and relevant information on a regular basis – all of which urges people to link back to you. The best part is that it allows you to be seen as an authority blogger in your niche, something you definitely should be proud of!
7. Successful Achievement of your Aims, Objectives and Goals
As a blogger, it is essential to set blogging goals. Goals allow you to remain on track, on target and give you the ability to measure and gauge your success or failures. Above all, goals give you a clear vision of something that you want to accomplish, and allow you to develop a path through which you can accomplish your blogging goals.
Such goals are usually short-term and long-term, and are updated with the passage of time. The more goals that you can simply tick off your list, the better, as it lets you know that you are on the right track.
For instance a new blogger might aim to get at least 30 views-a-day on his blog initially, however some months down the road, not only would he have achieved that goal, he would also have a completely new, different set of goals like getting to a 1000 opt-ins, or maybe making an x amount of money from his or her blogging efforts. Devise paths on how you intend on achieving your goals.
Great information and really well explained. Google Analytics is a great tool to monitor your website statistics and see where you can improve to see that you are headed in the right direction. Thanks:)
Hmm… That’s interesting. I do get increasing number of visitor, comments not so. I guess I need to travel a lot more before reaching stardom. hehe
How about you Shamelle? Do you think you have already reached the blogging stardom? And how long did it take you to reach that?
The points that you have mentioned are actually the ones that are in the change. However as of now it is now working positively for me. I mean to say that everything is going vague now for me.
Those are 7 good ways – I guess I would add making money if you are selling a service or eBook or affiliate products on your blog too, right? I don’t check stats as often as I used to and I feel I blog better since doing that.
This post is brilliant, thank you for sharing it. I always wonder if I am on the right path, and this has really helped me to see if I am doing the right thing or not. I am going to start checking if I am on the right path regularly and make changes if I am not.
I think the more objectives that you can basically mark off your record, the better, as it allows you know that you are on the right monitor….Thank you..
Managing the blogging stardom is one of the daunting task. One wrong move and you are gone forever. The indicators mentioned in this post are true and correct and can act as the guiding force. Thanks for the share.
If ‘Comments Are The Lifeblood’ consider this a TRANSFUSION from me! Great article. I’m going to try to implement these tips on my path to SUPER STARDOM!
The tip I liked best was to Set Blogging Goals. I’m going to start setting goals weekly now! Thanks again.
Great tips! I am a beginner to all of this so it is very nice to know whether I am on the right path to becoming a great blogger! Thank you for sharing this post, it has been very useful.
Starting out a new blog without any experience can prove to be fairly frustrating. Because just writing won’t help, writing blogs that will be read and appreciated will what help you achieve the desired results. But how will you know whether you are in the right track or not? This is rather an important question as most writers don’t realize the mistakes they do. These seven points that you mentioned are the accurate pointers to show you that your blog writing is on the right track.