Blogging: Measuring Your Efforts

Boost your blogging efforts through measurement

While Wavelength is off site training a client on blogging best practices, now is a good time to look at the other side of the coin: measuring the fruits of your efforts.

Stating the obvious: the point of applying blogging best practices is to attract the right audience (vs. any audience).

Tone, relevancy, keyword integration, industry commenting and monitoring are designed to attract potential customers to your blog where you have the opportunity to engage, educate and activate.

For many B2B and B2C marketers, blogging is a critical program element within an integrated marketing communications strategy. With increasing adoption rates due to the associated value, few marketers with enough resources to execute a blog have to ask themselves "why do this?".

Rather, they find themselves asking, "What are we getting out of it?".

Some simple measurements to consider:

Customer Engagement

Reviewing actions taken is an easy place to start. Did the visitor click on embedded links, register to follow future posts or share your content with his or her community? The amount of in-blog activity you see will help you determine the relevance of your content.

Reviewing your site stats in tandem also provides useful insight. How long do people stay on your site? Where are your most common drop off points?

Keywords

Reviewing the keywords that drive traffic will help identify the appropriateness of your audience. If there is a mismatch between the keywords that are being used to find your site and the keywords (or phrases) that are appropriate to your product and audience, an adjustment is required.

Remember not to guess at keywords and don't just rely on your internal team to develop a list. The most effective keywords are those that are identified using customer data.

Referral Sources

A robust blogging program includes commenting on or referencing industry sites and blogs. How many referrals are you receiving to your site from relevant industry web sites? If the answer is few -- or less than you'd like it to be -- this is an area you may want to shore up. Your best customers are likely to be referred from relevant online industry resources (such as publications).

If you don't have a strategic plan for your blogging efforts (within the context of a larger social media plan), develop one. If you don't have an editorial calendar, it's time to get started. Not only will a plan and a calendar improve your abilities to blog efficiently, they will also improve your ability to measure your efforts.