This post originally appeared on the ACS Creative blog. Reprinted with the author’s permission.
Sometimes businesses get caught up in the day-to-day mechanics of blogging—writing posts, promoting them through social networks, responding to comments—and forget to check how successful those efforts have been. Does that sound like your business? Now is a great time to review the status and effectiveness of your blog to help you set goals for 2010.
Check Purpose
Businesses start a blog for a variety of reasons:
- To build community around the business or brand
- To improve visibility in the search engines
- To build authority or thought leadership within an industry
- To personalize or “put a face on” the business
- To enhance understanding of products and services
- To increase leads or sales efficiency
- To increase brand recognition
Over time a blog evolves, so it’s a good idea to check whether your blog is still meeting your initial purpose and identify other ways it benefits your business. For example, suppose your initial goal was to improve your visibility within the search engines. You might find that you’re seeing only a little improvement in search, but because you’re providing relevant and valuable content on a regular basis, you’re developing a growing community that’s helping you provide better service to your customers—and you’re gaining brand recognition in your industry. Use observations in this area to refine your overall blog strategy going forward.
Check Content
When it comes to evaluating your content efforts, quantity, consistency, and quality are informative checkpoints. Have you met your goals for the number of posts or amount of content you planned to generate through your blog? Keeping an eye on metrics such as number of posts/month, average words/post, number of posts /topic and the number of indexed pages on your site are useful productivity measures to help you uncover any deficiencies you need to address.
Consistency means setting a schedule for your posts—then sticking to it. How consistent is your blogging? Are there times when you struggle to maintain a consistent presence? What adjustments can you make to improve the regularity of your posts?
Evaluating the quality of your content really involves just one thing: How well are you meeting the needs of your audience through the topics you cover, the mix of posts you write, and your ability to capture reader interest? Asking the following questions can help you determine the effectiveness of your content and identify tweaks you might need to make in your content strategy:
- What topics did you set out to cover and how well have you covered them?
- Do readers find topics and posts relevant, valuable and interesting (e.g., are page views and number of subscribers on the rise)?
- Are there topics or types of posts that don’t resonate at all with your audience? (Eliminate them!)
- Have you tried incorporating different types of media (e.g., graphics, audio, video) within your posts to spark interest and attract new readers?
- Do you monitor customer questions and feedback to improve your content’s relevancy?
Check Engagement
The third important characteristic of a healthy blog is the level of engagement readers have with it, which you can measure through comments and links from outside sources. For example, how many comments do you typically receive per post? Do you actively monitor and respond to comments—that is, are you proactive in developing and nurturing conversations around your blog? Don’t be alarmed if you receive relatively few comments initially. Building an engaged readership takes time and effort, and you’ll likely need to make improving engagement an ongoing goal.
Inbound links provide a good measure of how much people are talking about your blog and sending people your way. There are numerous ways to keep tabs on inbound links. Yahoo! Site Explorer not only reports the number of inbound links to your blog, it also provides some information about the links. LinkDiagnosis is another tool that provides in-depth information about inbound links, and if you use Hubspot’s BlogGrader, you’ll get a summary that reports the number of inbound links, the number of Diggs and Delicious bookmarks and ranking information comparing your blog to the rest of the blogosphere.
Keep Your Blog in Tip-Top Shape
Checking the health of your blog is important to ensure that your business gets the most benefit from your efforts. Checkups are relatively quick and easy to do through a little tracking and the use of some simple tools. If you haven’t already done so, plan now to establish a baseline for your blog’s health during Q4 of this year. Then, schedule regular checkups throughout 2010 to keep your blog in tip-top shape.
Matt Chamberlin is Director of Strategic Marketing for ACS Creative.
