ideaLaunch Blog

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I began my “career” as a professional writer as a personal blogger. I use the term career lightly because when I started writing online, I wasn’t doing it for money. Personal bloggers typically write for validation and attention rather than profit, and so we measure the success of our personal blogs differently.

A personal blog measures success by comments, RSS subscribers and traffic. But as I found when I began writing for corporate blogs, measuring the success of blogs written as part of a content marketing strategy is very different.

Even the most successful corporate blog rarely gets a ton of comments. Also, subscriber numbers may not be a good indicator of whether or not your blog marketing is working for a corporate blog. If comments and RSS subscribers aren’t reliable measurements, what should you be looking at?

3 Ways To Measure The Success Of A Corporate Blog

Search Engine Traffic

One of the best reasons to start a corporate blog is to boost your search engine traffic. Google in particular loves blogs because of the evergreen nature of the content. Corporate blogs also give you endless opportunities to improve your keyword density and internal linking. Every corporate blog should use some kind of tracking system to determine how much traffic you’re getting and where it’s coming from. Keep an eye on how many visitors you’re getting from search engines and what keywords they are using to find you. You want to focus on watching this number grow from month to month.

Twitter Traffic

While personal blogs rely on the number of comments each post gets to gauge audience interest, the mark of an interesting corporate blog is usually seen in the amount of attention it is getting on Twitter. It’s not uncommon to see a post on a corporate blog retweeted several times and still have very few comments. You can keep track of your Twitter exposure by watching your stats – how many visitors are referred by twitter, installing a “Tweet This” counter on your blog, or monitoring a Twitter search that alerts you to any time your blog is mentioned on Twitter. I recommend a combination of all three tools to get the most accurate picture.

Outbound Traffic To Your Main Site

Unless you’re selling advertising on your corporate blog, traffic alone will not improve your bottom line. It doesn’t matter if Google is sending you thousands of visitors a day if none of them end up buying what you’re selling. It’s important to keep the end goal in mind when you’re working to build a successful corporate blog. Pay attention to how many visitors leave your blog to go to your company’s About page or, better yet, Order page.

Always remember that a corporate blog is a tool. Popularity alone does not pay your vendors or employees. Put your focus on measuring the activities that directly impact your profits.

Britt Reints is still a personal blogger living in Orlando, Florida.  Her personal blogging friends think she is a sell out.  She thinks she has cuter shoes than they do.

Tags: blog, blogging, blogs, search engine traffic, Twitter

This entry was posted on Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 9:33 am and is filed under Twitter, blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.