I’ve never been so crass as to blog about this blog’s Technorati rank, nor do I obsess about what my server logs are telling me or Google Analytics for that matter. To be frank, there’s a lot of things I could be doing better to build audience, or at least track what audience I have, but since this is a personal affair designed to cure my ongoing case of cacoethes scribendi (yes, I studied Latin), I haven’t focused on audience development.
I do have a corporate blogging project under management, and that does deserve some serious audience development. It softlaunched back in the late spring, with utterly no fanfare, as I wanted to let it simmer for a while and get the bloggers contributing to it comfortable with the ineffable customs of Blogistan before really seeking some traffic. This post is an attempt to come to terms with what constitutes blog “success” and then share some of the tricks I’ve picked up from reading the masters and from messing around with blogs since 2002 when I launched my first one on Blogger.
While a personal blogger — which I am under this umbrella — may not give a rat’s ass about traffic, it’s still nice to know that you aren’t talking to yourself like a psychotic in the median strip of Park Avenue shouting at skyscrapers with a Bible in hand. So what are the indications of life on a blog? How does one declare success on a corporate or commercial blog? After the jump I get into it. Continue reading “Blog marketing and measurement”