How Do you Score Your Blogging Success?
Kamigoroshi’s “Footsteps in the Mirror” post on the three year anniversary of the blog made me think long and hard about how we use our blog’s scorecard to measure our blogging success:
…that got me all nostalgic and I ended up going through my own archives and as it turns out…Footsteps in the Mirror had it’s birthday…yesterday. I didn’t even know about and why would I? It’s not like I’m big on birthdays anyway…
Anyway, there was something I was meant to do a while back when I hit my 1000th post but never got a chance to do it with so many things happening in my life all at once. Seeing this is supposed to be a special occasion for my blog, this is as better time than any to do that challenge and up the ante a bit.
To celebrate his blog’s birthday this year, the KamiCast – Happy Four Years Of Blogging is a podcast, showing how blogging has moved from just words on a page to the voice telling the story, another sign of a blog’s growth and evolution.
When I started blogging, I thought, as all people thought in those days, that blogging is just a way to recording the past. Nobody could have foreseen how big blogging would become today. All we did back then was use it the best way we knew how, whether it be wiping off dirt and putting it on a silver platter, blogs gave people like me a way to record a moment in time that I didn’t want to forget. Moments in time that make me the person that I am now.
Whether it is the birthday of your blog or not, everyone takes stock once in a while to see how they are doing and what they have done.
Kamigoroshi’s scorecard was the milestone of 1000 posts blogging across three years. That’s quite an accomplishment. That’s just over one blog post per day.
Did you just check your blog post count? Did you just stop to think about how long you have been blogging and how many posts you have done in that time period? Did you check other statistics on your blog to see how you compare?
The fascinating thing with birthdays, holidays, and other notable scorecard triggers is that when they happen to other people, it triggers a response to stop and think about ourselves and our accomplishments. We compare our accomplishments and scores against others. How many posts have you done in the past 3 years, 3 months, or 3 weeks?
We measure our accomplishments on our blogs in many different ways. For some, it’s the daily, weekly, or monthly web traffic statistics. How many visitors have stopped by? For others, it’s the measure of consistent and returning readership that scores our blog’s success.
Many thrive on sudden bursts of fame such as being dugg by Digg, or linked to by Wired, Engadget, or other big traffic driving blogs.
Some count comments. Others count comment spam.
What are the scorecards you use on your blog to measure your own blogging milestones? What are your blogging milestones?
Lorelle VanFossen blogs about blogging and WordPress on Lorelle on WordPress.
We just recently started a corporate blog at beginning of the New Year for our company. In all honesty, our blog, ‘Turning News Into Knowledge’, currently has only has two blog comments for 19 posts.
We are monitoring our traffic and it is starting to get some momentum. However, we don’t expect it to be an overnight success. That said, I think over time, if you are blogging for the right reasons, the audience will grow – especially if you have something to say of value.
Our reasons for blogging are sincerely and honestly expressed in our latest posting at: Rule Blog Tannia – Why Companies Should Blog.
Not only do we explain why we blog, but also why other organizations should blog.
As for how we are currently measuring success, well we (our company) believe that the blogging has helped us internally understand what we do a little bit better. If our blog ends up being popular or helps other people, then that’s a bonus in our minds.
I should be hitting 1 million page views right about the time of my 1 year aniversary.
Wow, thank you for the mention and the reference. On a note, I have tried to use my blog’s incoming stats as a measure to it’s success, but in comparison to other people out there, it’s not something that can be measured due to is low visits.
I am using the community that builds on my blog as a measure of its success. How many people would come back and read it. How many people would interact with what I write. For a personal blog, appealing to the mainstream isn’t something that everyone can do. It’s about the fact that you can have 50, 100 or even 200 people come back and read your thoughts and feelings.
I would think that’s a whole lot better than standing in front of mainstreet and yelling to everyone how you feel that very moment.