Is This Thing On?
You have done all your planning, have your blog looking good, producing quality content on a regular basis and have been diligent about promoting it every chance you have, but is anyone reading it? Let’s look at some ways to determine how things are going with your blog.
Most people think that comments are a sign of how well your blog is doing. I say this totally depends on your audience. I would say that a large percentage of blog readers (I would venture 90% in my case, and sometimes 100%) don’t leave comments on blog posts. There are many more consumers of content out there than creators and contributors. I truly believe you don’t realize the value of a comment until you begin to blog. Then you quickly learn how the feedback and interaction can help foster ideas and conversation.
Well, if no one is commenting on my blog, how do I know people are reading it? Easy, I installed Google Analytics on my blog when it was built. Just generate a new code and insert it in the footer template of your blog theme. Some themes even give you a place within their configuration panel to make it even easier. I can see the traffic spikes on my blog the days that I have posts, so I know people are at least going to the page. I like to review the referring sites area of my analytics to see which spokes are driving the most traffic.
In addition to analytics, I have people that come up to me and talk to me about a post. They aren’t comfortable posting a comment, but they have ideas or thoughts on something I said. It’s pretty cool when this happens and makes a great conversation starter if you know you are going to meet someone new. Take a look at their blog and bring it up in discussion.
You set up your subscriptions with a tool that can track your subscribers, right? We talked about this earlier this month. This allows you to track how many people have subscribed to your blog and the reach gives you an idea of reach which is the number of people that read your blog via their reader or clicked through to read it.
These tools give you some idea of what posts are most popular and your overall readership. What have I missed?
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Comments
Kyle, Good point. That’s why I talked about subscriber numbers and even posted on using a tool like Feedburner to track subscribers earlier this month at: http://marketingroadhouse.com/?p=411
Yes, apparently anyone using Comcast had trouble reaching my sites this morning due to a DNS issue. Thank goodness for RSS.
Thanks for your comment.
It’s funny how some people won’t even start a blog because they are so afraid that no one will read it. Google Analytics and Feedburner are great suggestions here for tracking progress when all else seems silent.
I like your point about valuing a comment more when you are actually blogging yourself. You will find yourself commenting because you all of the sudden realize what it does for the blogger. Also, some people do not realize this, but posting comments can help you as well.
If you offer some additional bits of useful information in your comment you could actually see some readers migrate over to your blog as well (assuming the link takes then there or close by). Plus, if you are adding to the conversation in a positive way, the blogger may actually offer you a Guest Blogging spot which is very valuable especially when you are just starting out.
As always, great post Beth, keep em coming!
One drawback about Google Analytics, is that it doesn’t help you track subscribers using RSS and Atom feeds. If you self host it is probably useful to view the stats on the feed’s xml files. Depending on your audience, there may be many readers using feed based tools. I subscribe to your blog using Google Reader; when I went to leave this comment this morning, I couldn’t reach the site due to the DNS issue… so you may have readers even if your blog is down!