I have just been reading an interesting article over on pro-blogger which was taking about measuring success of your blog. Throughout this article the guest writer Stephen Guise of Deep Existence maintained that neither traffic or content is a good measure of success.
This kind of set me aback, and set me thinking as I have always judged the success of blogs and sites in general by their content and their traffic stats. However I do see the writers point here, getting hung up on content and traffic stats can sometimes get in the way of the real judge of success and that is that of what your readers or customers actually think of your site.
This is often not an easy thing to quantify. I know for a fact looking at search terms that a large number of people come to this site looking for specific DIY details relating to roofing materials and our orangery project, however, do those visitors find what they read useful? That is a question that is very hard to answer, I hope that they do.
On some of my posts on this site, I have reviewed tools, these reviews have (yes I admit it, shock horror!) affiliate links to recommended suppliers for those tools. Once could suggest that a good judge of what my readers think of the content is if they click on that affiliate link and buy that product, but it really is not as simple as that, they may find the information useful and as such the post as done a good job in that regard, but they may have missed the affiliate link for some reason, or simply decided to buy elsewhere, it maybe that those posts are good, useful reviews but poor at pushing the visitors through to the affiliate sites.
I know that these reviews must be useful as I have reffered many buyers to the affiliate sites, but again the reverse argument to the above is valid, did my review give them the information that they needed or was it just the piece that swung the balence after reading otehr reviews.
I think that I will stick to my ethos that good content is king, if you provide useful, unique information that people will want to read and will benefit from reading, then surely you will not go far wrong.
As for measuring the success of a blog or website, I am unsure. Repeat visitors is clearly a good method, people coming back must see something that they find useful. I will keep thinking about this as I look at the stats for this site falling due to lack of blogging. So no, I think that visitors are a good judge of success and good content leads to visitors so I will stick by my fundamentals that content is king.
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