Lorelle over at The Blog Herald is asking about bloggers success criteria
What is your definition of blogging success and popularity? What do you use to measure it?
I think it is important when starting to blog to at least spend a moment to think about why you are doing it, what you will get out if it, what you hope to achieve. That said, my goals have changed a great deal with my own blogging and are different with every new blog I launch.
The goal for this blog is quite simple. I am thinking about this stuff anyway. Nick and I talk about this stuff when our schedules align. Blogging my thoughts on new media means I have fun, because I enjoy blogging as an activity, and allows me to share my thoughts with more people and hopefully get some feedback. Yes I will look at my bloggers scorecard occasionally, compare my blog top trumps (visitors, subscribers, etc), but the goal here is quality of conversation. If I am getting good intelligent comments, particularly comments that actually change my opinion on a topic, that is success.
Performancing was all about building a community. The registered users,
the forum threads, comments, posts promoted to the homepage.
Contrast this with my first blog. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. My personal homepage was more about cool features and the programming challenge, learning new programming developments. A big part was attention seeking, scanning the hit reports daily. Through this urge to gather more traffic I turned my attention to search engines and an interest in SEO.
Blogging is great for teaching yourself a new subject and learning a new subject provides ideal content for a blog. My digital SLR blog was started with this in mind. DSLRBlog unlike the others of mine you might have seen does have advertising, those ads help keep my camera gear addiction from bankrupting me. Writing that blog, explaining to others things I have myself been learning, plus the connections I have made through it has helped me learn more about photography than I ever would have otherwise.
One thing I don’t do normally is to blog purely for the money. With my current bank balance this is going to have to change, heh. It is sometimes a secondary motivation, but I haven’t built a site purely for income since my affiliate marketing days. What is more common for me now is to recognise after building or writing something that I could monetize it and apply ads or an affiliate link as an afterthought.
Blogging with a clear goal is probably a contributing factor in achieving success. Focus is good. Keeping your eye on the prize, plus making decisions with your goal as a litmus test keeps you on track. Seth Godin blogs to sell books. Brian Clarke blogs partly to generate leads. As does Andy Hagans.
Only when you know what you want out of your blogging can you tell if you are getting something back in return for the time you spend doing it. Your Return on Blogging Investment. If you don’t have a goal for your blogging, perhaps you should decide on one?