Blog Tipz

We all work towards success. Even though you may only be looking to develop relationships with others, this is success in itself. You may not have set extremely high goals or reached huge milestones in your journey as a blogger, but it important to keep in mind that the largest businesses today might not have started down a clear path, either.

Setting goals and meeting them is the first step in the process of success – as you meet one goal, create another until you are able to reach them all and run an overall successful blog. The next step is being able to asses where you’ve come, where you are going, and how you want to view your blog.

The Success of Your Entire Blog

Although blogging may be a tiresome process for some, it can be an exciting and time worthy process for others. It is all about how you view your blog and your motives for attaining your goals. By the time you have completed your first month of blogging, you might be able to get an idea of what is involved and how you might be able to reach your goals.

All blog posts combine together to create a valuable resource for your visitors. You don’t have to have a ton of posts, just quality. Some would rather have a thousand posts by the end of the first year each drawing in an average of five visitors per post, while others would rather have a hundred, lengthier posts that draw in several hundred visitors each. In either case, writing and researching the posts will take about the same length, although with more posts, it takes longer for management and creating a navigation structure.

Most bloggers look at the following aspects when determining how far they’ve come:

• Income – How much money were they able to bring in through their blog and how effective have they been at monetizing the site?
• Readers – Whether in the form of RSS subscribers, direct readers (through bookmarking), or through alternative services like Twitter, the number of people that return is extremely important in terms of long-term growth.
• Visitors – Meeting visitor targets is most important if you are looking at monetizing your site. You can’t make a full-time income with just a few hundred visitors per month. Additionally, these figures help you compare your site to the overall market (of blogs/sites, that is).

Using these four main decision factors, you can begin to get an idea of how successful your entire blog is. It’ll obviously take some time, and you should be thinking about these after you write each post, in order to get ideas for the next post – which will hopefully help you meet your goals much more quickly.

The Success of Individual Posts

When you write a post, you might not expect it to gain a lot of visitors. Social networking sites have made it much more difficult to gauge the success of a post. However, this really isn’t that important compared to what you do with the traffic when it hits your site.

With each post, you are trying to add something of value to your site. For you, it might mean a little extra revenue for your site over the long-term, it might mean increasing your average comments, and it could also increase traffic.

The main factors when judging the popularity of a single post include:

• User Interaction – How did users react to the content, and where did it occur? Ideally, you want to keep as much of the reactions/comments on your own blog. This might mean integrating Twitter or some other comment method into your blog, otherwise your responses will be distributed throughout the web.
• Unique Visitors – If the post increased traffic to your blog, it is an indication that it had a level of success. Even though you wanted the traffic to crash your server, it isn’t a bad thing to have a surge of traffic for a few hours.
• Increased Subscribers – After traffic surges, you may find that by publishing this post, you have increased the number of readers. Ideally, this can be replicated in the future.

Conclusion

More factors go into judging the success of your blog than those listed above, but I wanted to help you formulate how you can go about doing this, at least until there are more factors that you can include. Depending on your personal goals, these will change and evolve over time.

Success comes in many forms, we all have our own ideas of success, and there are dozens of ways that we can judge success. When it comes to blogging, you have to be realistic in how you judge your blog and how well it is doing, not overweighing the elements that aren’t important.