How Successful Is Your Blog?

Let’s say you have been blogging for months, and you are getting decent traffic, but you are curious if you are on the right track as far as your blogging career is concerned. A lot of folks don’t make more than a couple of hundreds a month with their blogs which means sooner or later they will have to make a decision about their blogging career. You can’t keep earning $100 a month and expect to be able to eventually quit your day job. So how do you know you are on track and how do you make sure you stay on track?

• It’s about your goals: you should treat your blog as a business. Think of yourself as a CEO of a business. That means that you should have an understanding of where your business is at the moment and a vision for where you want it to be down the road. Not many businesses survive without having a vision. If you don’t know your final destination, how are you going to take the necessary steps to get there. If your ultimate goal is to make $200 a month to pay your bills, then that would be your milestone. I usually try to aim much higher, so you may want to define other goals once you hit your first milestone. Nobody is going to make millions in this business overnight. It takes many milestones and thousands of baby steps. But you’ll get there if you plan right.
• It’s about traffic: so you want to make money from your blog. If you don’t get people to your blog, how do expect to make any money. Traffic should be one of the metrics that you consider in your blog performance forecasts. As a part of your forecast, you should consider unique visitors, visits, pages per visit, and time per visit. If you use Google analytics on your blog, you can access this information easily.
• It’s about community: blogging is not about making a quick buck. It’s all about building relationship, assets, and a viable business overall. Having growth forecasts for your RSS feed subscribers and email subscribers allows you to track your progress to see if you are on the right track. You should also track comments and feedback that you receive from your visitors and get them even more engaged in your community.
• It’s about revenue: you work hard to create valuable content for your users, and you spend hours to promote your blog, but if you are not making any revenue, you won’t be able to sustain your blog for too long. Your goal should be to develop and test new ways to increase revenue for your blog. That would include creating a marketing plan to engage sponsors and advertisers. In addition, you should also consider affiliate marketing and product creation as means to generate extra revenue for your blog. At the end of the day, there is so much you can earn from Adsense or Widgetbucks. You shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket. One way to make sure you stay on track is by having bi-annual or annual revenue forecasts. That way you can figure out whether you are on track or your business is under-performing.