Six Blog Items Worth Measuring

by John R. SedivycloseAuthor: John R. Sedivy Name: John R. Sedivy
Email: john@capecodbranding.com
Site: http://www.capecodbranding.com
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Introduction
One of the biggest problems I had early on with establishing our blog was determining what was meaningful and what was fluff in terms of a blog. What did it mean to have a good blog? Was there a way to measure the quality of blog? Were there various levels of goodness or was it all qualitative?

As a former engineer I like to measure things, in fact, I am almost obsessed with measurements. As a former project manager I like to set achievable goals and compare my performance against said objectives. Well, it turns out there are things you can measure and all blogs, or even websites, are created equal. In the spirit of transparency and helping out one another I am going to discuss what we have found to be valuable metrics as well as example goals that we are striving to meet for February 2009. Enjoy.

Metrics
Based on our experience and research we have found the following metrics to have value and have recognition within the online community:

1. Web traffic
2. Subscribers
3. Website Grade
4. Alexa Ranking
5. Content
6. Money

Each item is ranked in priority order – my opinion. I will address each in greater detail.

Web Traffic
We had discussed in a previous article that Traffic = Money; since I have heard this from multiple sources (both published and online) I believe it without a doubt. If Traffic = Money, then what would more important to measure? Monitor your traffic levels and constantly strive to increase traffic, especially in your early days of a blog. Steve Pavlina discusses this in much, much greater detail in his article “How To Make Money From Your Blog”.

Subscribers
I view subscribers as a consistent form of web traffic and therefore should be maximized. Your number of subscribers will be much, much less than your overall web traffic, however you should make a constant effort to steadily increase this over time. Start small and gradually increase, setting small, manageable goals. Content is king here as people will only subscribe if they believe there is value in your content in order for them to stick around for the long term. As each subscriber is notified when you post new content, they are basically waiting for your next article and hanging on your every word. Do not disappoint, maintain a high content quality level – consider this.

Website Grade
In an article titled “HubSpot & Website Grader” Amy discusses the importance of the Website Grader tool and basically how this site assists with optimizing your blog. Every effort should be made to increase your website grade by using this tool. Refer to the preceding article for detailed instructions on how to accomplish this. The main idea here is that optimizing your website will drive more traffic and potentially more regular subscribers – we have seen this work firsthand.

Alexa Ranking
Your blog or website’s Alexa ranking is critical as it is visible to the entire online community. Alexa basically ranks all websites on the Internet in terms of web traffic. We will provide an article focusing on Alexa in the future, just suffice to say this point is that it is important that it measures your traffic and allows you to compare yourself to your competitors and peers.

Content
Content is crucial for a successful blog. Without good content you may get some traffic, but not a large amount sustained over time. Visitors may land on your site out of curiosity if you’re new, or accidentally arrive, but if your content is lackluster, they won’t come back. Strive to develop stellar content and keep them coming back for more.

Think of content as your way of staking your claim in the Internet. You should strive to write as much as you can but without sacrificing quality. The more quality content you possess, the more seriously others will take you as they will realize the time and effort spent on drafting said content. Once your content becomes popular on sites such as digg it will also increase your website grade on the Website Grader tool.

Money
Last but not least is money. You might be thinking that I am off my rocker listing money as last concerning the items that should be measured and that I should move it to the number one spot. There is an old Chinese proverb that states something like “if you love what you do you will never work another day in your life”.  I live by this philosophy and it ultimately led me to blogging.

My rationale is that if you become excellent at a given task and the money will follow. Since Traffic = Money and the metrics listed up to money are all focused on driving traffic to your blog and optimization – it only makes sense that these activities will all lead to money. If all you focus on is money, the other metrics will suffer – and in the end it will be self defeating. That being said you should set a monthly monetary objective, at a minimum. Your objectives outlined in the preceding sections should drive your monetary goals.

Example
Let’s use Cape Cod Branding as an example of the six blog metrics. Table 1 provides the Cape Cod Branding (CCB) Web Traffic Goals. As shown the first column provides the month, the second the goal for a given month, the third the actual amount of traffic received for a given month, and the final column is the remaining required traffic for a given month. For example, we like to use 20% as a good model for increasing metrics from one month to the next – a 20% increase in traffic would correspond to 22,884 total visitors for the month of February (20% more than the 19,070 we got in January).

Table 1. CCB Web Traffic Goals

As of the writing of this article (February 3, 2009) we have had 3,927 since February 1, 2009; this means that we need to have an additional 18,957 visitors to our blog by close of business February 28,2009 to achieve our total goal of 22,884 for the entire month. Because formulas are programmed into the spreadsheet to minimize duplication of effort and minimize the possibility of human error (remember it is best to automate processes whenever possible), you will see error messages for the remaining goals until actual values are inserted for the remaining months. The “total” row at the bottom of Table 1 is meant to provide a running total of the “goal”, “actual”, and “required” web traffic. The subtotal is really for internal reference as because of our server migration in January 2009, we wanted a way of reconciling with our current stat counter without necessarily throwing away our previously attained traffic levels. Refer to Blog Server Migration Part I and Blog Server Migration Part II for additional information on that activity.

The important take-away is that it is strongly recommended that you track goals, actuals, and required remaining traffic to achieve such goal. It is recommended that you do this on at least a monthly basis.

The next example metric is the number of Subscribers as outlined in Table 2. As with web traffic we track the goal, actual, and required for a given month. This table has a remaining column for notes as when we originally set the goals for February on January 31st we had 3 subscribers. At the time we thought it good stretch to attempt to double our subscribers. When reviewing our results on February 1, we had achieved our goal of six subscribers!

So we decided to create a revised goal, just to see how far we could exceed the original goal. The main point here is that the notes column is just meant to document notes to yourself. I tend to forget the rationale for some of my decision making and find it useful to document for later use.

Table 2. CCB Subscriber Goals

Table 3 provides the CCB Website Grader Goals. The table format is the same, so it is not worth elaborating on here – there are a couple of items worth noting though. First, at the time of this writing we have achieved a grade of 61 out of a total of 100, based on our projections we hope to reach 100 by May of 2009.  Not sure if this is a realistic timeframe or if a perfect score of 100 is even attainable, however my thought is that this score is important enough to monitor over time to ensure that once we do reach the peak that we do not slip. In addition whether if it is possible or not my thought is if you strive for perfection, at a minimum you will achieve excellence. We have seen enough of a difference in traffic since implementing the HubSpot recommendations so it warrants attention.

Table 3. CCB Website Grader Goals

Table 4 provides the CCB Alexa Ranking Goals. At the time of this writing we have an Alexa Ranking of 5,326,842 and project out to December 2009 where we hope to achieve a ranking of 416,337 or better.

Table 4. CCB Alexa Ranking Goals

Table 5 provides the CCB Content Goals. Currently our goal is to achieve posting one article per day without sacrificing content quality. This is a delicate balance as on one hand we are driving to develop a backlog of articles, however we do not want to develop too much of a backlog as to make the backlog content less relevant. Presently I generally write the content on the day of, or the day before and content has been a journal of sorts as to where we are taking the business. We may decide to post twice a day to accelerate the building of our reference library but that will depend largely on the results of studying our hourly and daily web traffic patterns.

Table 5. CCB Content Goals

Table 6 provides the CCB Monetary Goals. Concerning tracking and format there is nothing new here. One thing worth noting is the slow growth that is characterized by monetizing a blog. We knew this going in as we had read the article from Steve Pavlina called “2005 Traffic & Adsense Revenue Growth” where he started at $54 on his fifth month of his blog and at the time of the article had achieved over $4,700 a month from Google AdSense. Being that this is only our second month goals our expectations are low – working backwards from Steve’s numbers we defined a goal of $16.00 for Month 2. Being that Steve only started publishing his numbers at Month 5, our goals are strictly an estimate. The main point here is that some may scoff at this low number, as I would have at one point, however it is realistic and the important thing at this point is to demonstrate traffic growth which will drive revenue as a result of the formula “traffic = money”.

Table 6. CCB Monetary Goals

In summary there are six aspects that we measure to drive towards success;  web traffic, subscribers, website grade, Alexa ranking, content, and money. I have provided you with guidelines on how to accomplish this. My recommendation is that you use this as a framework but pick the attributes that matter most to you and tailor this process to meet your needs.

Set measurable goals to monitor progress and drive your blog to the next level!

-John R. Sedivy of Cape Cod Branding

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