how do you measure the success of your blog posts?

Let’s get straight to the point: what do you want your blog posts to do? I’ll tell you what I want mine to do, win traffic and engage the reader. This puts the reader into my funnel as a potential new customer. I consider it the job of my blog and social media to fill the funnel from the top. Therefore, it’s important to know if the process is working. How can I find out if my blog posts are delivering traffic and engaging my readers? Here’s 9 tools I use:

Twitter notifications

When I publish a new post the 1st thing I do is share it to Twitter and Facebook (see below). My Twitter notifications tell me who has commented, re-tweeted and favourited it, this gives me an indication of its popularity.

Twitter analytics

Twitter recently made available access to some of their analytics which you can view by logging in and going to 

analytics.twitter.com. Here you’ll find some interesting data on your top tweets, impressions, mentions. While it’s more about the performance of your Twitter account, if you’ve shared links to your blog posts, these will be in there too.

Facebook insights

Similarly, Facebook has its own set of analytics called Page Insights. Here you can see which posts are your best performers and how much engagement they got.

Topsy

Topsy is a favourite tool of mine. I use it to find out how many times my blog post url has been shared on Twitter.

Google Analytics

GA is the stalwart of online analytics. For analysing website traffic it’s hard to beat. I use it to view how many visits my blog posts get and where my visitors come from.

ahrefs

ahrefs is a great tool which does a lot of things, one of which is search for ‘top content’. What this means is I can enter the url of my blog and it will list all my blog posts and how many times they have been shared on social media. This provides me at a glance with my most popular content.

As if this isn’t cool enough, it’s also possible to enter a 3rd party url and see what their top content is! I’ll let you have a think about that.

The downside is it’s not free. There is a free version with limited features, but to get the most out of it there’s 4 pricing options.

Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is a bit like ahrefs, but whereas ahrefs is predominantly an SEO tool, Buzzsumo is all about content. Also a premium tool, the free version is too limiting to be of any use, but for $79 p/m you unlock most of the features.

Not much tells Buzzsumo apart from ahrefs when it comes to measuring the success of your content. The price will be the deciding factor for many. If it’s just the content metrics you’re interested in Buzzsumo delivers more bang for buck.

Comments

Genuine blog post comments is as good a measure as any of how well you’re doing. I say genuine because blog post commenting is an old SEO trick which caused so much spam back in the day many bloggers decided to disable the ability for readers to comment, me included.

Spokal

Spokal is an inbound marketing plugin for WordPress. One of its features is called What to Write About. It lets you know what your most popular posts have been to date so you can write more like them.

Google ranking

It might seem obvious, but a great way to see how well your blog post is doing is to Google it and see where you’re sitting in the search results.

How to make your content more successful

If you’re not seeing success from your blog posts, the  first thing to do is assess your titles as this is the first point of contact with a potential reader. We wrote more about this here.

If your titles are working, but you’re not seeing the engagement, then there must be something wrong with your content. Check your voice and tone matches the expectations of your reader.

The best way to find out if there’s a problem with your content is let us write your next blog post. If ours performs better, you’ve found the problem.

Alakazam is supported by over 30 writers, we have a writer for every topic.