Remember when you were at school and you were terrified of grades? Even if you were working on a cool project and you enjoyed the process, it still had to be graded and that fact was too much to handle. But your teachers kept telling you that grading was important not just because the educational system was tailored that way, but also because you needed to know how effective your efforts were.
When you write for your blog, you’re still dealing with grades. Maybe you’re not getting them in a standard format, but the audience is constantly giving you hints that tell you how successful your project is.
That’s tricky.
The audience is judging you, but you’re not seeing the actual grades. How do you learn to recognize them? You’re doing your best to develop a good blog and you follow all trends. But how can you be sure if your blog is attractive for the readers?
There are ways to check! We’ll list 4 factors that clearly indicate how successful your blog is.
1. How Many Connections Have You Made?
You probably assumed that we’d start with finances. If your blog is making money, then it’s successful, right? Not so much. You can have a blog that doesn’t make money at all but still is successful. We’re talking about the factor of attractiveness, so we’re focused on immaterial things.
This is the first indicator of success: how many connections have you made?
When you become a blogger, the network you build is extremely important for long-term success. You have to make an effort to meet new people with similar interests and passions to yours. This doesn’t mean you’re forced to make fake friendships with people you don’t like. We’re talking about genuine connections with bloggers you consider your mentors and bloggers who would love to learn from you.
How many of these do you have?
If your answer is “not many,” you must do something about that.
- Work on your LinkedIn profile. That ’s the best platform for making connections based on interest.
- Start guest blogging. Contact your favorite bloggers with a suggestion for a high-quality article that would be featured on their website. Keep that connection alive!
- Invite guest bloggers at your own site. Be careful with the editing process, since you only want the best content. Be a good mentor to those who don’t meet your standards and offer tips on how they can improve the article before you reject it once and for all.
You might be thinking: “Connections with bloggers? Who has time for that? I have to focus on writing and promotion!” Well yes; writing and promotion are your major factors of interest. Still, the journey of becoming a successful blogger involves much more. If you have trouble producing a lot of content, you can get it from guest bloggers or professional writers from cheap writing services.
The important thing is to leave yourself with enough time to develop the other dimension of blogging, which involves less writing/promotion and more communication.
2. Are You Getting Any Inbound Links?
When you start getting backlinks from high-quality websites, you may say that other bloggers like your blog. When other bloggers and website owners like it, you may rest assured that your entire audience is happy with the content.
How can you be sure?
Well, good bloggers want to link to good websites. When they direct their audience somewhere, they care about their experience. That’s why we tell you to care about the links you get from top-notch websites.
How do you check that? Link Explorer, a tool developed by Moz, will give you the info you need. It doesn’t only give you a list of content that links to your site. It also measures the quality of those websites, based on metrics like spam score, domain authority, and page authority.
If the results are no good, you’ll have to do something about it.
- Write better content. Content that great bloggers would link to! These are usually long-form articles that discuss a matter in detail.
- Showcase your expertise! You should base your content on facts, but think about uniqueness at the same time.
- Make sure that content is seen. This is when your promotional efforts get the spotlight.
3. How Many Subscribers Do You Have?
Email lists are far from dead! This type of marketing may take a lot of your time since you have to develop content for the emails on a weekly basis. Still, the number of subscribers shows how attractive your blog is. The more you get, the better you’re doing.
It’s not just about numbers. It’s about making your audience happy! When people come to you for solutions and subscribe to your email list, it means they expect to get high-quality content in their inboxes. So you have to try hard. To get more subscribers, you’ll need to try harder.
- Set realistic goals. If this is a new blog, you can’t hope to get 10K subscribers in a week. Just set the goal of progress.
- You want the numbers to show a steady growth. If you stopped getting subscribers, it means you’re doing something wrong. Think of more unique topics and write better content.
- Make sure the subjects of your email messages are great! That’s the first thing the recipients see, and it usually is the only thing they see before they send the message to the trash. If the subject line is attractive, it will get their attention. They will access the email and follow the link to your website.
4. Are You Getting Comments?
This is the most obvious metric that conveys the popularity of your site and blog posts. If you’re getting a lot of comments (like at least 20) on each new post you publish, then you may consider your blog to be well-perceived by the audience.
Needless to say, you won’t count the spam comments. “Great tips” accompanied with a link to someone’s blog is not a comment that proves your blog is successful. You want real discussion, questions, and suggestions in the comments you get.
You want engagement not only on social media but at your website, too. People often comment on Facebook without really following the link. The comments under your blog posts really indicate that your site is getting popular among readers.
- Here it comes; the same tip again: write great content! Write content that people would love to read. Write content that offers real solutions and calls them to action.
- Include calls to action! Your calls should trigger a discussion, so the readers will be prompted to share their opinion once they go through your post.
Is Your Blog Attractive?
- The connections you have with other bloggers
- The backlinks you get
- The growing number of subscribers to your email list
- The comments under each blog post
Those are the main factors that grade your blog. Are you ready to do some measuring? It’s important to know how popular and attractive your blog is! When you have that starting point, you can work towards improvement.