How Do You Measure The Success Of Your Blog?

If you’re a savvy blogger already then you’ll probably be obsessed by statistics such as the number of unique visitors to your blog, your subscriber numbers, the number of comments generated by each post and the number of track backs & links your posts attract.

If you’re a novice blogger or thinking of starting up a blog, then these are the stats you need to familiarise yourself with because they tell you at a basic level how popular your blog is.

I can tell you now though, that whist I’ve been ever-so-slightly obsessed by subscriber numbers in the past (only when I set a goal to get 1,000 subscribers for the LI blog – which we achieved well within the 6 month  timeframe we set for ourselves), I don’t tend to pay too much attention to the blog stats these days.

Whaaaat?

[I can hear the voices of certain stat-obsessed bloggers squealing in my ear right now!!!]

That’s right – whilst I do use our blogs as a marketing tool for our business projects, I don’t pay a huge amount of attention to the blog stats. And here’s why…

• We used to use the blog stats as KPIs (key performance indicators) to measure our business success but I became suspicious of how useful they really were, when trying to tie them to our bottom line performance measures.
• Whilst blog stats gave us an idea of the reach & scale of our blogging and front-end online marketing efforts, they didn’t give an accurate overview of how this impacted some of the really important KPIs for our business (such as Client Lifetime Value = how much each client is worth to our business, Client & Project profitability = how much profit each project/client generates, etc.)
• Because of the nature of blogging, the lead time between someone discovering your blog and then deciding to sign up as a client can be a relatively long period of time. Within that time, many other factors come into play which help determine whether the reader becomes a client; things like interaction with you on Twitter, LinkedIn & other social networking sites. It becomes very hard therefore to say that it was purely the blog which influenced a prospect’s decision to work with us.

And finally, the primary reason I don’t pay much attention to the blog stats…I blog because I have things to say which I think & hope will be useful and of value to others; and whilst traffic/subscriber/comment numbers might give me an idea of whether this is the case, in reality they’re not that accurate.

I’d far rather put out a post which I think is useful and receive very few or even no comments than put out a post which is full of fluff, written for social media votes & generates lots of comments but adds no real value to anyone (the latest post on the Location Independent blog was a good example of this).

So I guess the real questions for me are these:

Do the stats that typically measure a blog’s success & popularity really measure the actual value a blog adds to its readers lives? How do your blog stats tie into the bottom line performance measures of your business?