There are so many blog metrics tools around it can be hard to know which ones are best and how to use them. Here are three quick and dirty measurements that will often give you a good indication of your sites development.
Nothing succeeds like success and success can often be measured in popularity. Blog metrics could be just a simple measure of your popularity.
Is your traffic growing?
A simple tool like a site meter will tell you if your site is growing in popularity. They are not always accurate but as we are only after a rough indication, they will suffice. Your site may provide stats in the form of AWstats or similar. A steady growth in traffic indicates an increase in exposure.
Is your readership growing?
In contrast to visitors, this measures the number of subscribers you have to your RSS feeds. Is this number growing, falling or stagnant. A growth in numbers indicates a growth in interest either from your visitors, or from splogs looking to re-publish your content.
Are the frequency and quality of your comments growing?
As you gain more authority and your readership grows you should start to notice a distinct increase in the quality of the comments left on your posts. The number of comments should start to increase as well. There will always be certain topics that attract more comments than others, however the quality of the actual comment should become more focused and of more use to other readers. This acts bait to bring in more commenter’s .
These are very simple measurements. However if you can start to see a growth trend in all of these areas then perhaps it may be worth the effort of getting a more advanced blog metrics measurement tool – and learning how to use it.
In the short term, blog metrics does not need to be complicated. The three areas I have pointed out can be measured with a glance on a daily basis and will provide the basic information needed to determine growth. Blog metrics – who needs the complicated data?
