How to Evaluate Your Blog?

Not all blogs emerge as the succesful one. The goal of blogging itself may determine how the success will be valued. Personal blogs need it as self-satisfaction, while business blog need it to drive profit. Here are some parameters usually use to evaluate the success of a blog. Some may not relevant to certain blog, since every blogger is a unique person.

Links

Links are a major factor in climbing the rankings in search engines. The levels of incoming links to your blog will also determine incoming traffic that follows them.

Trackbacks

A speciial comment arrived to your blog when another blogger links to your article, called a Trackback. The more trackback indicate how imporantan your writing that others like to reviev it or use it as a reference.

Technorati

This is a popular service that counts how many references to your blog have been made by other bloggers. The Technorati ranking, called “author-ity.” will count your popularity in six-month period.

Traffic

Bloggers evaluate their own blog using traffic. Some online servive provide tools enabled bloggers to count seem several aspect of traffic. Each tool will give a different result though, since it use different methodology. But, at least, the whole picture can be catch.

Unique Visitors

The number of unique visitors is determine by each unique IP address who visit your blog. This can be used to count the exact number of people almost accurately. Unfortunately, there is several problems on determining the unique visitors since IP address might be different between today and tomorrow, or many different computers could be simultaneously surfing under one number due to differences in how networks can be organized.

Visits

An individual visitor could make several visits to a blog. Visits are more reli-ably measured than unique visitors, but to compare results you have to agree on what constitutes a visit.

Visits are also sometimes termed “visitor sessions.” Depending on who you listen to and which software you use to measure, a session could be calculated in several ways. One popular way to determine a session is an unbroken stream of page views after a certain period of inactivity. If someone visits two pages ten minutes apart, is that two page views in one session or two visits?

Many website owners take note of average session length as a way to deter-mine how long people spend on their site. As websites become less about downloading pages and more interactivity within a page, session length is gaining attraction. The longer visitors spend looking at your content the bet-ter, because it means they were more engaged and according to media-types, gaining more affinity with your brand.

Page Views

Page views are the total number of pages read in a web browser. Most bloggers like to know how many page views they attract both on a daily and a monthly basis.

As well as the total page views, you also should monitor ratio of pages viewed per visitor. It is best to have both a high number of pages viewed and for the average visitor to read more than one page.

Each article you write will receive its own page views, and by comparing indi-vidual page counts you can work out which articles are gaining the most atten-tion, giving you an idea what content your audience finds most interesting.

Hits

Hits count the number of requests sent for a file to the server.

This is a dated and largely unhelpful metric because every request for any file is counted. Though it sounds useful, in actual fact it gives you little information that is actionable. If you have a page containing four images, one request for that page is counted as five hits. To increase your hits you could just add an image to the page!

Due to the misleading nature of the metric few people use it seriously, and the phrase “hits” is often erroneously used in conversation and the media when what they actually mean is to describe traffic in general, or specifically visits or page views.

Subscribers

Bloggers can vary from indifferent about subscriber counts through to subscriber-obsessed. Why are subscribers so important?

Counting a blog’s subscribers gives a good indication of how popular it really is because these are the people who want to read your content long-term and have signed up to receive updates so they never miss one. These are your loyal readers, the people you can hopefully count on to come back again and again.

Whereas the metrics mentioned before are important, and they are tradi-tional measures for any website, subscribers are critical to blogs. A visit could be a person arriving, not finding what they need, and going away never to return. A subscriber has made a small commitment to you and demonstrates you are providing something a little more useful and compelling.

Subscribers are usually split into RSS subscribers and email subscribers, though as I will explain, the lines are blurring.

RSS Subscribers

RSS subscribers are the people who use your feed to read articles. They use a feed reader (service or software application) to pull down updates to your feed and might never actually visit your blog at all.

The most popular feed-measurement service is FeedBurner.com, and because of this most bloggers rely on that service to compare progress against each other. Both Bloglines and Google provide a count of readers using their feed-reader services, but only FeedBurner provides a count across all of them.

Even though nearly all bloggers rely on FeedBurner, even the company would admit that counting feed readers is not an exact science. Numbers fluc-tuate every day, and glitches can make it seem like you have lost or gained readers almost randomly. The best idea is to use the count as a progress guide and not an exact count of individuals.<