7 Indicators That You Are On The Right Path To Blogging Stardom

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.

Blogging Success

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:

  1.  Being found for the right, most relevant search terms or phrases (keywords/phrases)
  2. You’ve successfully been able to engage anyone who comes on your blog by providing valuable, quality, informative and interesting content and information
  3. Anyone who lands on your page is tempted to browse through your blog and read the various articles
  4. 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.

62 thoughts on “7 Indicators That You Are On The Right Path To Blogging Stardom”

  1. Is an ever-increasing income generated by your blog a good indication of success? Because I’d say it is! Other than the indications that you mention, financial factor is one of the most beneficial!

  2. I concur with you , when you initially start off, It’s really hard to get comment even if you get decent amount of traffic on your blog. The first day I got a comment that wasn’t Spam i new that I’m moving a step forward.

  3. Great information on how to check on the progress of your blog, will keep these in mind. Also I think the most important reason is to have a growing number of traffic per month. If you are noticing a significant change from month to month your blog should be doing well.

  4. If you have great contents, I guess everything else will follow. So I prefer concentracing writing the article instead other things (links building, social media, etc)

  5. I love that this is a post about “indicators” not so much a “how to”. We all to often follow how-to methods without knowing how to see if what we are doing is actually the “right path”. Everyone needs checkpoints to guide them.

  6. in my opinion having a low bounce rate is an essential indicator that your are doing something right. I believe the golden rule is that your main keywords should form the top 3 words on the content keywords list in google webmaster – this means that as google sees your site as relevant to these words and is more likely to put you in a higher position than say a better established page which doesnt have enough keyword density to be trying to rank for that keyword phrase (sorry for going off subject a bit) low bounce rate means your visitors click through to another page on your site meaning they wanted to find out more a good indicator that your site is relevant – How do you get a low bounce rate? as an overview: 1. content is king and 2. user friendly site should be your starting point – thanks for the tips

  7. We are truly on the road to pinnacles we have always wanted to be at.
    It has been a rough road, going by that we were just novice about everything.
    Took time, commitment, dedication to learn, apply and progress as a blogger.
    There has been ups and downs, Google Updates, Technical hitches and such. The latest EMD update just promoted us further, doubled our traffic. Our feed subscribers, always increasing.
    The one objective on this list we have not yet fully understood how to manage is Social media presence. We are still figuring out how to increase our presence.
    I would urge all upcoming bloggers to hold on, have an objective and apply a white hat strategy; you will get to the top.
    Together, towards a prosperous future.

  8. Great insights, I hope I could be able to say that I passed the list you shared here but for the mean time I just have to enjoy my baby steps towards that blogging stardom.

  9. It’s been a month since my blog was launched. Alexa rank and traffic of the site is gradually improving, so i think i am on the right path. Thanks for this great post my friend. It is really a insightful post

  10. Yes! these are the most essential insights to track the success of any blog. Personally, I believe the reduce number of bounce rate. Bounce rate can easily define your success, and the most important the financial reports 😉

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