Monitoring Blogging Success

Once blogging on a regular basis and beginning to build new relationships, it can be helpful to keep track of the progress of your blog. Statistics are easy to review for ongoing measurable information about the readers of your blog.

Recommended tools for monitoring statistics are:

• A Google Analytics account that will give you detailed information on who is visiting your site.
• A Feedburner account that will keep track of the number of subscribers.

You can also visit major blog search engines to find link citations to your site made by other bloggers. A few popular blog search engines are: Technorati, Feedster, Blogpulse and Bloglines.

In measuring your overall ROI and blog success, there are several metrics it can be helpful to review:

• Traffic (unique visits, page views and bounce rate)
• Length of time readers spend on your blog
• Total subscribers through RSS and Email
• Comments (total number and quality)
• Popularity on social bookmarking web sites
• Incoming links (where visitors are referred from)
• Total trackbacks
• Search engine ranking
• Blog ranking (on web sites such as Technorati)

Data from all of these sources will give you important information to help you improve your blog over the long term. Individual pages with a large amount of views could indicate that it is a topic readers are interested in or the quality of the post was especially good. Consider observing these trends in order to develop future posts for content that will be valuable to readers.

Negative or constructive feedback from the trackbacks of other bloggers may need to be responded to in a post. Especially positive trackbacks can be responded to by leaving a personal comment on their blog, fostering that new connection.