total randomness…

So, now you have finished posting an initial burst of blog entries and start to wonder about the perception of your blog. Are readers interested in your blog? Do they think it is good and worthwhile? Are your blog entries too much about you and less about the readers? How does your blog compare to others?

Following are five simple ways to measure the quality of your blog.

1. Number of comments per blog entry – Only quality blogs evoke user responses. If readers took the time and effort to comment on your blog, then it means that they found your blog entry to be of high quality.

2. Rating of your blog entries – Your blog ratings should give a general sense of the attractiveness of your blog. The more ratings you have, the more accurate this becomes. Obviously, you want ALL your readers to give you rating; you should strive to deserve that with your writings.

3. Number of Repeat visitors – Besides your closest friends, are you getting a good number of repeat visitors? Did all the readers who commented on your previous blog entry come back to comment on your current blog entry? Just as in business, there is nothing more indicative of quality than repeat clientele.

4. Number of New visitors – Are you seeing comments from a few new faces with every new blog entry? Good blogs spark conversation among people. If that conversation and word-of-mouth is happening for your blog, you would find a trickling stream of new readers for your blog. Refer to my old post, Building Readership.

5. Number of websites that link to you – While this is tricky to measure, it is a good way to evaluate the value of what you write. There are several blogs, forums and websites in the internet today. If you write something valuable, it will be picked up and linked too. You should consider every incoming link (external websites that link to your blog) as a badge of honor and a strong indication of the quality of your content.

Your blog is your brand. It says a lot about you. It defines you in some ways. Constantly keeping an eye on the above five quality metrics and using it to improve your blog is the sure fire way to build a killer brand for your blog.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 14th, 2008 at 4:56 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.