How engaging is your blog? 17 metrics to measure

Measuring the effectiveness of a publicity campaign is one factor that separates the true Publicity Hounds from the Publicity Pups.

If you have no way of measuring the success of a press release you’ve posted online, then why are you posting it?

The same with your blog.

My friend Don Crowther, an Internet marketing expert who measures all the time, has 11 engagement metrics you need to track at your blog.

Some of them will be a little advanced for beginning bloggers. So if you’re struggling to come up with enough content for your blog and enough time to write it, concentrate on producing the content for now. You can return to the task of measurement in several months.

All of his metrics measure what bloggers are getting, like traffic, unique visitors and subscriptions to their RSS feeds. I commented at his blog and suggested that bloggers also measure from the other side. Instead of just measuring how much we’re getting, let’s measure how much we’re giving.

6 more things worth measuring

I offered these six examples of “giving”:

—How often are we blogging? I hear from so many people who start on Monday and quit by Friday “because I’m not getting any traffic.”

—How often are we writing about our competitors?

—How often are we featuring guest bloggers, including our competitors, who have something valuable to say to our readers?

—Do we bother to reply to comments at our blogs? I started doing this a few months ago, fairly consistently, because it shows I want to continue the conversation, and I’m noticing the number of comments from others is increasing. Also, replying will encourage people to return to my blog to see what I had to say about their comment. Besides, it’s the polite thing to do.

—Do we show readers that we welcome comments and prod them into writing them? You did in the last paragraph of your post above.

—Do we show readers how easy it is to use our blog? I love your little note reminding people to get a gravatar. I’m going to steal this idea (I know you won’t mind) and use it at my own blog.

And a time-saving tip

I also left this P.S. at Don’s blog. It has nothing to do with measurement, but it’s a time-saving tip you can use at your own blog:

P.S. As I go from blog to blog posting comments like this one, I sometimes them turn my more substantial comments into posts for my own blog. That’s what I’m going to do right now. I’ll simply save these comments to my clipboard, go over to my blog, write a post, link to this post, and add to my list if I can think of anything else.

In other words, the post you’re reading here originated from the comments I wrote at Donsg blog. You can do the same thing.

Whenever you comment at somebody’s blog, or answer a question on LinkedIn, or create content for something like handouts for a presentation you’re giving, ask yourself if you can turn it into a blog post. That’s one of the many tips that Patsi Krakoff and I shared during the teleseminar we presented in January on Time-saving Tips for Smart Business Blogging.

What metrics to you measure at your own blog? And what other ways do you engage your readers? Comment here.