What’s the most important metric for measuring the effectiveness of a real estate blog? I’ll bet the first answer for many readers will be traffic. That’s often the default answer, a bit like gauging the strength of the property market by the number of people through a home open.
But we all know the answer is more complicated than just visitors.
My first answer is comments and conversions. But really it’s comments, because they almost always lead to conversions.
Then it’s how many times was the article shared. Readers only share content they find interesting. Really, they share posts that they believe their friends will find valuable, useful. So sharing is a key metric for the effectiveness of a blog.
There are other metrics, ones that are more obvious, so obvious they’re hidden.
Here are some that Avinash Kaushik recommends:
- Raw author contribution
This is the measure of the raw grunt work you’ve put into writing and it translates into the number of words and posts created over time. There’s no escaping it, blogging takes effort. There are four numbers to watch.
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- Number of Posts / Number of Months Blogging
- Number of Words In Post / Number of Posts
I’ve published 449 posts since my first in June 2007. It was titled I’m a Skeptic. How things have changed.
Using that measure my score is:
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- 449/43 = 10.44
- 95,409/449 = 212
That’s an average of just over 10 posts per month at 212 words per post.
Of course there’s a WordPress plugin to measure this. It’s called Blog Metrics by Yoast. I installed it and here’s what it came up with.
Notice the big increase in posts per month over the last 30 days. That coincides with my 5000/365 Challenge. But what’s interesting is the number of comments per post and the number of words per comment has also increased with the volume of posts. So the more I post the more comments per post I get. In other words the extra work I’m putting in to content creation is being rewarded by my readers. And that helps build my brand.
Although it’s hard work I intend keeping up the work rate. How about you?
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