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.
The blog having strong social media presence with quality content tends to generate huge traffic if equipped with quality content and user friendly features.
People not caring about bounce rate now days, but I think its also one of the factor of goolge panda. High bounce rate means our content is not useful totally.
Well, your all 7 indicators are very important! thanks for the share.
Great article and very true. Hard to determine which one to focus on to get the desired results but time and effort are the staple. In the end unless it is your full time job it may take a year to get significant traffic. Thanks
Shamelle,
Thanks for putting out some valuable information.
I had started my Blog 3 months back & was looking for some tips on how to promote & how to get some success with it.
I believe now I have some pending tasks to do after reading this post.
Thank you Shamelle, I have to admit I’m fairly new to blogging, but it is articles like this one that make me believe that I can achieve something with blogging when I work really hard. Thanks again.
Well, we can also identify the traffic if we put facebook like plug-ins. Like what have you said here, I find social sites to be effective to see our traffic plus it can spread news too if they share our sites.
Great indicators of whether your site/blog is headed in the right direction! Instead of obsessing over the next Google update, these are reliable methods for tracking the growth of your site. I agree that having goals and putting them down on paper (or screen) is also key in being able to gauge how far you’ve come and where you’d like to go in the future. Thanks!
Overall I think engagement is good way to measure a success of a blog. The more people comment and share, the better it gets.
Be consistent and you’ll be surprised with the fruits of your labor. Blogging is a very powerful form of communication now, seems like a new television broadcasting during the 80’s or 90’s when everyone is tuned in to. A mass media. Accessible to everyone.
I’ve got 3 sites, all over 5 years old (one in it’s second decade). The oldest one has been re-vamped and, six weeks ago when business slackened off (from our main income stream- which is also web based), I started modding and adding in very original content on the oldest site. In the past 4 weeks, traffic has doubled and average page views are up to 4 per user. Alexa ranking has gone from 2.6 mil to 948,000 since 4th Sept 2012. Just started backlinking and have a lot more content to add. One thing to note: Internal links for relevant keyword combinations is a real must in a blog- especially if you’re using wordpress- otherwise posts will get buried and not found in search results!)