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From Buildify, we have an overview on corporate blog post effectiveness, including a list of 3 ways to measure your blog post’s effectiveness:

1. The amount of comments left on your blog,
2. Whether or not your traffic starts to climb
3. How many links you are getting from other sites.

I’m going to add a fourth technique: 4. measuring conversion rates, which is probably the most important technique of all.

In the following, I’ll to expand on each of these in much more depth.

1. Increasing the comment rate on your blog

How to get more comments on your blog is a topic worthy on a longish post of it’s own.

But here’s two simple techniques you can employ right now:

1. Ask for comments as a call to action,
2. Create controversy such that readers feel emotional compelled to react.

Using both of these techniques effectively is an art form. On the one hand, grubbing for validation isn’t attractive in any context, and readers will sneer at pathetic attempts to draw their attention. On the other hand, if you don’t ask, or don’t engage your readers emotionally, why should they leave comments? It’s work for them with little or no benefit in return.

Also, if you don’t have much traffic, don’t expect many comments no matter how much you ask or how controversial you are.

Simply put: I’ve read on several professional blogging sites that 1% is a pretty good comment rate for readers.

From my experience, this is going to be 1% of the readers for a particular post. That is, a post has to reach a certain popularity before people start to comment. 10 posts with 10 readers each, in my experience, does not results in any comments at all.

2. Building traffic organically

The strategy on Website In A Weekend is to build the bulk of the traffic “organically” by writing high quality articles on a regular basis, with the best WordPress SEO techniques known, and let the search engines percolate the articles up in the results pages as the residence time in the search engine index grows.

The reason for this is very simple: I, Dr. WordPress, know how to write a lot of articles, but I’m not yet an expert on any of the other methods useful for building traffic. I’m going with my strength, with what I know best. I recommend you do the same when you’re just starting out.

My key technique for building organic traffic is using accurate, compelling titles for blog posts.

3. Getting backlinked

Backlinks are touted as one of the best ways to get your blog shooting up the search engine results pages (SERPs). There are several ways to get backlinks, which I have ordered in terms of personal preference:

1. “Natural” backlinking from other authors, where specific articles you wrote are mentioned and linked to as part of the text of the linking article. This is purportedly the strongest form of backlinking. The link to the Buildify website where I drew the material this article is a natural backlink for Buildify.
2. High quality link exchange has driven traffic to Website In A Weekend. Provided the exchange service is ethical, operated by someone who cares as much about high quality content as you do, you should investigate whether using a link exchange service will work for you. As you can see, I’m using Blog Traffic Exchange (BTE), and it’s working very well for me. The operator (Kevin) responds to email in a timely fashion, and removes spam blogs from the exchange.

   As a matter of fact, this article was inspired by the Buildify link listed after an article right here in Website In A Weekend. I use BTE myself! Note: I am not affiliated with BTE, and don’t even know if there is an affiliate program. I just like the service and I think you will too.

3. Backlinking from comments and forums isn’t as useful as it used to be with the advent of the “nofollow” attribute for hyperlinks. When you make a comment on a website or in a forum, “nofollow” means the search engine doesn’t load that link and use it to calculate page rank to your site. Since nofollow isn’t used everywhere, commenting on forums and blogs can help at least a little.

   Comments and forum posts with links back your blog help drive traffic regardless of nofollow, but that traffic is more a measure of the value you add to the forum or comments on the other website, rather than the value people get from your blog post.

4. Getting listed in directories used to be an excellent way to generate great traffic. These days, not so much. I’ve submitted to several free directories, but haven’t received any traffic I know of from them.
5. Paying for backlinks. I’ve never done this, I don’t know how to pay for backlinks. I’ve heard search engines tend to punish sites that are known to pay for backlinks. It goes against my notion of what the web is supposed to be, so I’m not inclined to pay for backlinking.

   All that being said, I don’t see a lot of difference between paid backlinks and other forms of advertising. If your content is valuable, it might be a very good technique. I plan on investigating paid backlinking in depth once I start paying for other forms of advertising on Website In A Weekend. You can be sure of reading an article on my experience at that time!

4. Measuring conversion rates

There’s several ways to measure conversion rates, ranging from really simple to really complex.

The easiest way I know for measuring conversion is by using hidden offers in your post, then keep track of how many people take you up on your offer. Here’s the conversion rate formula:

C_r = O/V * 100,

where C_r = your rate of conversions in percent, O is the offers fulfilled, and V is the number of views for the offer. Remember, because the offer is “hidden” within the text of your article, not everyone is going to see it, not everyone who sees it is going to recognize it right away as an offer, and then most people will pass on the offer anyway.

More complicated ways to measure conversion require using a service such as Google analytics. Watch for several posts on Google Analytics and other tools in the future.

Note that each of these methods above (except for paid backlinking) for building traffic to your blog require some time and work on your part. Your payoff is gaining high quality readers. There really isn’t any shortcut to this, you have to put in the time to get the results. But your results will be worth it.

In closing, how many more ways can you think of to measure a blog post’s effectiveness? Can you show something provable, with numbers to back your claim? I’d love to add it to this list with a full explanation and, of course, links as necessary!