You should expect a lot. A well-designed and optimized blog is a powerful tool. You can use it to reach thousands of people and maintain a personal dialog with them. You can use it to generate new business, expand your market share and even essentially dominate the internet space surrounding a niche market. But quantifying the results you get can be difficult. It’s important to know what to look for. Here are a few metrics that people use to measure whether their blog is meeting their goals or not.
- Overall traffic
- Unique visitors
- Page views
- Income generated either directly or indirectly from blogging (ad revenues, affiliate products, sales and/or leads generated from your blog, etc)
- # of comments on posts
- # of feed subscriptions
There are many other things you can look at as well. So the point is, it’s important to get into blogging with a plan. Think of it as you would any other marketing tool in this regard. The leverage is fantastic, and you can use a blog to effectively reach any number of goals, but know up front what your goals are going to be.
It’s important to know before getting started that blogging is not a magic bullet. A search engine optimized blog can be the most effective tool available to you for getting solid search engine results in your business, but it’s not going to happen automatically. A lot has been written regarding how to get traffic to your blog fast. I honestly think looking for fast results may lead to disappointment. Any meaningful results take time and effort. You didn’t build your business overnight, and you won’t build a successful, meaningful readership overnight either. Consistent effort over time however, will enable you to build a powerful network and many meaningful connections with people. Embracing this technology is a way of growing your business in a way no other marketing tool allows. It allows you to keep it personal while completely leveraging your time. I honestly feel blogging represents the most effective yet highly leveraged marketing tool available to business owners today.
It requires that you think about things differently. Otherwise, you’ll end up using a blog the same way you do any other old school marketing tool. Unfortunately, when you just use your blog or facebook or any other social networking tool as a means of advertising yourself, the results you get fall entirely short. Blogging is about building a meaningful, personal network of people and maintaining a dialog with them. It’s interactive more than it is purely marketing. It’s new media. It’s highly effective, and it’s massively cost effective compared to any old media tools.
What blogging goals do you have? What specific ideas are you employing to make sure your goals are reached?
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