How do you measure the success of your blog? The are many blog metric tools available however when it comes to measuring the success of your blog, sometimes the simplest statistics are the best. An interesting article by Paul Wright at Fish and Clicks titled ‘The Best Blog Metric” was rather thought provoking.
Paul’s take is to use his RSS statistics as a gauge of his blogs success. To extract a quote from his article:
……in my opinion 1 subscriber is worth way more than 1000’s of irrelevant uniques. If this blog were an e-commerce site 1 subscriber would be the equivalent to a sale.
I cannot help but agree with the last part of that statement, for a blog, each subscriber is the equivalent of a sale.
Take a step back and consider what a blog is. I may be wrong, however my interpretation of a blog is that it is a vehicle that enables me to broadcast information to the masses. However the masses have to want to view what I am broadcasting. A blog metric tool needs to be able to measure that desire.
I can have a thousand visitors in a day. How many actually stop and read and how many drop in and just as quickly drop out again? There are blog metric tools that measure things like bounce rates, length of stay and pages viewed. Those measurements are not really a measurement of the popularity of your blog. Return visitor rates would be but they are not as easy to measure.
The one measurement that is a good indicator of your blogs popularity is, as Paul Wright suggest, your RSS statistic. It takes a conscious effort to subscribe and you are only going to take that step if there is some attraction, or as I describe it, a desire to read.
Using a service such as Feedburner has the added benefit of providing a limited range of statistics. It also has the facility to value add to the feed with advertising and dedicated feed messages.
How do you measure the success of your blog? Is there a blog metric tool that you rely on? Are your RSS numbers an important indicator of your blogs success?
