Cindy Szponder’s Tips

Being fairly new to blogging, I was glad to learn how to track my blog’s success. I learned about this in Publish & Prosper, and although they are referring to tracking the success of a business blog, the info is valuable for any blog owner.

A simple goal to aim for would simply be, for example, to try to increase the Google search results for a specific phrase related to your blog. In my case, I could monitor “work from home” or “measure the success of your blog”.

Another measure is how many inbound links you have. You can learn this through a Google search string like this:

link: www.YourBlogsAddress.com

Another place to check on your blog is at Technorati.com. Go to Technorati and claim your blog. Just follow their directions from there. You can track your Technorati rating as you move forward with your blog to see how popular it is with others.

If you host your blog on your own domain, you can use your cpanel statistics area to check on how many visits your blog is receiving. I like to check my Awstats area to see how many visits occurred. I can even tell which days and times my blog receives the most visits, what country the visitors are coming from, which pages are visited most often, and if anyone is linking to my blog. I can also check out my error stats–something I’ll cover in a different post.

I then usually visit the stats that tell me who or what has visited my blog. I’m beginning to love spiders!

Finally, if you want to compare your blogs to those of others in your area of interest/business, you can use Alexa. Of course, this only gives you information about people that have installed the Alexa toolbar, but can still be of interest.

Ultimately, you’ll have to decide what kind of tracking is important for monitoring the success of your blog. After all, you’re not blogging just to talk to yourself are you?