9 KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS FOR A SUCCESSFUL BLOG
If you want to run your blog like a business then just like any other business its important to focus on specific key performance indicators in order to meet your goals.
Its important that you regularly check stats, monitor traffic and revenue, by doing this you can monitor your blogs performance and find ways to improve your blog and meet your goals.
Here are 9 Key Performance Indicators for a Successful Blog.
1) Site Stats
One of the easiest performance indicators to figure out how successful your blog is by analyzing your stats, If you are not yet analyzing your stats its really easy to get started with, I analyze my stats using the Jetpack Plugin via WordPress and also by using Google Analytics.
You can gather a great deal of information about your blogs performance from you stats such as the amount of sessions, Average Session Duration and the amount of New and returning visitors. This can also show you areas of improvement.
2) Social Media Interaction
Social Media Interaction measures the ability of your site in engaging your readers and audience, Its important that you constantly monitor user interaction over social media. For instance keep track of how many re tweets you get and the types of Tweets that get re tweets and favorites.
Its also important that you keep track of the amount of followers or page likes you have on your social media profiles, With regard to Twitter there are various apps which keep track of the amount of un followers you are getting and new followers.
More more social media interaction you get the more likely people will be engaged with what you are posting on your social media sites and therefore will be directed to your blog.
3) Email Subscriber List
The size of your email list can tell you a lot about the performance of your blog, If people like your blog and want more of your content then they are going to opt in to your email list, However if they don’t like the content or want to return its very unlikely they will want to sign up for your emails. There is a direct correlation between the number of email subscribers you have and the amount of email traffic your blog gains. Its also important to monitor the number of readers opting in daily as well as the amount of people who are actually opening and reading your emails.
4) Number of Posts Published
Data shows that the more you blog and publish the more traffic you will gain, Tracking the number of blog posts published is really easy and is great for identifying trends and correlations between the amount of content you have and traffic your blog gets.
5) Social Shares Per Post
Its important that you monitor the amount of social media shares each of your posts get, this can be easily done by installing the Cresta Social Share Counter plugin which will keep track of the number of social shares on each social media platform. Making all your content easily sharable is critical for marketing purposes.
The number of social media shares each of your posts get will give you a good idea of which posts get the most reader engagement and which types of posts or content perform well in social media.
You can use this information to improve your social media marketing strategy for example if your posts are getting a lot of shares over twitter however does very poorly on social media sites like Pinterest then you may want to consider which social media sites you market and promote your content on.
6) Average Comments per Post
Tracking the amount of comments on your posts is a key performance indicator for reader engagement, the more comments you have on your posts the more your readers are trying to engage and interact with you.
If your user engagement is low, think about ways you can improve it and encourage it this can be by posting questions at the end of your posts or by interacting more with your audience. More more engaged your readers feel with you content the more likely they’ll share your content and come back to your site.
7) Top Viewed Posts/Pages
Which of your posts or pages drive the most traffic to your blog?, Identifying these top viewed posts can help you to analyze and find out the topics and types of posts which your audience engage with best.
If you are struggling for traffic you now know which types of posts or pages drive the most traffic to your blog, so create more like these.
8) Blog Growth
When it comes to Key Performance Indicators growth is arguably the most important, If your blog isn’t growing then your blog obviously isn’t performing as well as it could be.
You’ll want to measure your blog growth in areas such as email subscribers, page views, Comments and income.
If you are going backwards or your income or traffic has dropped considerably since the previous month then its important that you look at ways to grow your blog going forward.
9) New/Returning Visitors
One of the most important Key performance indicators for your blog is the amount of New Visitors you are attracting. Getting returning visitors coming back over and over again is great however in order to grow your blog and be successful its important that you have new visitors.
You can see the amount of new visitors your blog gets in comparison to returning visitors by using Google Analytics. If you are getting more returning visitors over new visitors you may want to reconsider your marketing techniques.
Conclusion
With Google Analytics and other Analytic plugins it is now easier than ever to monitor your blogs performance and figure out your Key Performance Indicators and how you can improve growth on your site.
If you want to run your blog like a business and grow your income and traffic then its important that you learn to analyse your blog statistics and make informed decisions on how you can improve the performance of your blog.
This post outlines 9 of the Key performance indicators, If you have any others which should be added to this post please comment below.
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