It’s the million-dollar question that every manufacturer and distributor wants to know about their corporate blog.

So, how do I know if my blog is working and helping my business?

If you pay attention to the 10 points below, you should get a good idea on your blog’s performance.

1. Count Visits & Unique Visitors

It’s important to know the difference between visits and unique visitors.  Visits are the total number clicks on your blog during a designated period of time.  A unique visitor is a single person that visits your blog.  They may come to your blog several times over the course of a week or a month.  Unique visitors are only counted once.  Both of these are good indicators on your blog’s success.

2. Page Views

A page view is when a person looks at a specific posting on your blog.  You can tell a lot from page views.  You can see which content is popular with your customers.  Examining page views will help you to brainstorm content topics that will resonate with your customers and business partners.  You’ll see what blog content is working and what content is not.

3. Time On Site

Time on site works hand in hand with page views.  This tells you how long a person spent on a specific blog post as well as your entire blog.  The longer the time spent … the better the post.  Time on site will help you to determine what content is popular on your blog.

4. RSS Feed & Email List Signup

When analyzing your blog, you’ll want to track RSS feed and email list subscriptions.  This is a good indicator on determining your blog’s success.  If people are subscribing to email and RSS feeds, it means that they value your content.  This is a great way to see if you’re building a following.

5. Call To Action

All blog posts should have some type of call to action.  A call to action can be signing up for an email newsletter, printing a coupon, etc.  The key is to track results.  You can do this by using a unique promo code with coupons.  The right content coupled with a great call to action on your blog can really boost sales.

6. Search Rankings

Is your blog’s content improving your search engine rankings?  All blog content should contain keywords with hyperlinks that point to your website’s most important pages.  If you notice a spike in your search rankings for certain keyword search phrases, it’s probably because of your blog.

7. Inbound Links

Take a look at how many sites are backlinking to your blog.  This is a good sign on the popularity of your blog and its influence.  By getting other blogs and website to link to your blog, you improve your search engine rankings in Google.  More people will find your blog this way.

8. Outbound Links

Having a number of links on your blog pointing to other people’s blog posts, articles and websites is also good for your blog.  This helps search engines like Google properly rank and index your blog postings so more people can find your posts.

9.  Community Engagement

Community engagement is another good indictor.  If you’ve got lots of people commenting on your content, it’s a good sign that your blog is a success.  It’s important to look at the quality of the comments.  You want to make sure the people commenting are prospective customers and business partners.

10.  Number of Social Media Shares

Keep track of the number of Facebook “Likes” and “Shares” as well as the LinkedIn “Shares” and Tweets from Twitter.  If your blog doesn’t have any social media buttons, you need to add them.  This will help people to find and share your content on social networks.

Summary

Your content marketing strategy should be relying heavily on your blog to serve as an inbound marketing aid and a content hub.

Consequently, you’ll need to look at your blog’s metrics.  This helps to ensure that your blog is aligned with your online marketing strategy.

What blog metrics are you tracking and why? How do these relate to your marketing goals? Leave your comments below.

For more helpful tips, read other postings on the Right On – No Bull Marketing Blog.  Be sure to sign up for our monthly newsletter, which is full of tons of helpful tips for manufacturers and distributors.  Also follow us on Facebook and join in on some great discussions!