HOW TO TURN YOUR BLOG INTO A BUSINESS: PART 5 MEASURING SUCCESS

. HOW TO TURN YOUR BLOG INTO A BUSINESS: WHAT IS SUCCESS & HOW TO MEASURE IT .

Can you believe it, today is the penultimate instalment of my 6 part series on how to turn your blog into a business. How time flies when you’re having fun! I’ve always loved sharing blogging tips, careers tips and even photography tips with you all, but creating a little series has been even better. I’ve loved having a plan of what i’ll write, being able to dig a little deeper into each topic and hopefully cover quite a broad topic in details! Have you enjoyed it?

If you’ve missed parts 1 – 4 then you can check them out here: Building a Brand | Creating a Business Plan | Learning to Network | Managing your finances … and today’s feature Measuring Success!

. IS IT WORKING? HOW TO MEASURE YOUR BLOG SUCCESS .

I’ve actually written a couple of posts previously on the very subjective and broad topic of success .. debating what is blog success, how to be a success, and also what makes a blog good or ‘successful’. But today I wanted to focus very specifically on how you measure your blog success, what are the best tools, measurement systems & stats to focus on, and a little touch on what to do when you’re not achieving what you set out to.

Below are 5 different tools or measurements you should be considering when looking at your blog success … what you’re measuring should link directly and feed from your business plan you created in step 2 (check out my tips on creating a business plan here). Your business plan defined what you wanted to achieve, what you needed to do to get there, and therefore what success looks like (money, page views, social following, content qaulity or quantity etc). So today is all about how you go about monitoring and measuring.

#1 GOOGLE ANALYTICS

Google analytics should always be one of your first points of call when you’re looking at measuring your blogs traffic, reach, engagement etc. The tool effectively and efficiently allows you to look at anything from the number of unique people coming to your blog, the number of times they visit & the number of pages they view, to where your traffic is coming from (regionally, audience wise & even from which device), beyond this it allows you to monitor and evaluate engagement with your site … bounce rates, content traction, repeat visits etc.

You should use google analytics to monitor your growth, your specific goals & also to help you monitor and optimise your content based on what’s gaining you the most traction. It can even help you identify areas to focus your efforts in terms of distributing and sharing your content, where you receive the most content from & where people find you!

#2 ENGAGEMENT

It’s really easy to focus solely on the volume of page or unique views you get each month … but whilst monitoring your reach is great (and a really good way of monitoring your success), it has to go beyond just views. There’s minimal value in tons of views, if people are staying for 1 second and you have a bounce rate of 99% …. engagement with your blog, your content & your social channels is a real indicator of your true value and influence to brands, and a really important thing to consider when monitoring your success.

You should look at things like site duration, likes, followers, shares, or comments to help you get a good idea of your engagement levels. Google analytics can help with this, but also consider monitoring your social pages & your bloglovin likes etc too!

#3 CONTENT

Surely a key success metric for any blogger is producing content, in fact producing great content. And so while monitoring blog traffic and content engagement is a great way of monitoring what your readers think of your site, you also need to review how YOU as content producer are performing. Are you hitting your target volume of content, is your content of a quality you’re happy with, have you been active on your social channels …

And how is this content performing! Is it driving traffic & engagement? Is it delivering social traction …

#4 SOCIAL TRACTION

Social traction is a complicated way of explaining social engagement. Social engagement is important as it’s the place most people go to find content, engage in conversation & to find and discover new things. Your social pages in many ways are now of the same (if not more in some cases) importance as your blog itself … it’s undeniable how huge and influential instagram is to a blog, it’s business and it’s success.

Monitoring your social traction – followers, likes, comments, shares, regrams, retweets etc, is another key way of getting a really holisitic view of your blogs success! Not to mention, it’s another element of your business where you can drive financial income, so this is another thing to consider.

#5 FINANCE

Finally, and potentially the most obvious way of monitoring your blog success (blog success as a business that is), is the income you’re receiving. Are you earning the money required to sustain your business, do you have a regular clientèle portfolio, have you won any great projects, are you converting through affiliates etc. Ultimately if you’re turning your blog into a business, then financial success and profit does become a hard bottom line success measure to monitor!

My final point on the topic is to say, don’t worry if at first you don’t succeed … success is subjective and definitely a work in progress, that’s why monitoring and optimising your business plan is so important. Tweak as you go, if one thing didn’t work, try another. And most importantly embrace the journey and have some fun along the way.

Have you found this post successful? I’d love to here the things you measure to monitor your success?