Blog content must be constantly tracked so it can be improved

Tracking the popularity of individual blog posts reinforces one of the major themes in this series on the 7 Pillars of Successful Blog Content; it’s not about you and what you want to write.

Instead, success is all about your market, and providing content that your market wants to read.

Accordingly, you should cultivate the habit of  tracking the popularity of your blog posts. This will help you provide:

• More of the type of content that your market wants to read
• Less of the content that only receives a lukewarm reception

Here are 4 ways you can track the popularity of your blog posts:

1. Comments. The most obvious way of tracking blog post popularity is to track the comments posted by blog visitors. Develop a way to track the number of comments added to your posts, noting whether they are positive, negative, or “just intrigued.” One of the easiest ways to do this is to create a simple spreadsheet, or mind map, and rate comments 1 (for a very negative comment), 3 (for a neutral comment), and 5 (for a highly favorable comment).
2. Ratings and Tweets. Another approach is to add plug-ins that permit readers to rate the relevance and quality of individual blog posts, or plug-ins that make it easy for your blog visitors to recommend your blog posts to their followers on Twitter, or other social media sites, i.e., Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Once set-up, these can provide continuing feedback while driving new traffic to your blog.
   
3. Downloads. Another easy approach is to create a landing pages and downloadable electronic content, such as PDF’s, audio MP-3 recordings, or streaming video that can be linked to specific blog posts. This approach can provide a lot of information, especially when used in combination with Google Analytics. Instead of just knowing how many files were downloaded, and when, you can find out how long the visitors stayed on your landing page, and additional pages of your web site they visited before returning to your blog.
4. Incentives & mailing list sign-ups. The best approach, however, involves converting a casual blog visitor into a prospect by providing them with an incentive to sign-up for your newsletter’s by providing their e-mail address and permission for you to recontact them in the future. The combination of helpful and relevant blog pots coupled with helpful and relevant e-mails can jumpstart even the most tired business, introducing a continuing influx of new prospects.

Intention and commitment

None of the above 4 suggestions for tracking the success of your blog content is particularly difficult. Like the 24 suggestions in the previous 6 Pillars of Successful Blog Content posts, few of the ideas I’ve discussed are impossibly difficult or prohibitively time-consuming or expensive. Like keeping track of comments and Retweets, most of the Pillars don’t need to be studied, they merely need to be implemented on a consistent basis. As discussed in Part 1, and as Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, and Les Hewitt wrote in The Power of Focus, “your habits determine your success.” The habit of tracking the success of your blog content is as important as commiting to consistent blogging schedule and content plan. Let me know how these ideas work for you, as comments, below.

Roger C. Parker invites you to visit Published & Profitable’s Sample Content Area and his daily writing tips blog to learn more about creating effective blog content and making your blog posts as easy to read as possible.

You can also download a PDF copy of the mind map I used to plan this series, plus links to additional writing resources, like a free report introducing mind mapping.

Roger is the author of 30 best-selling books and an experienced writing and marketing coach. His latest book is #Book Title Tweet: 140 Bite-Sized Ideas for Compelling Titles for Articles, Books, and Events.