Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

I often wonder about how to measure the success of this blog. While there are many tools to measure page views and visitors, the absolute number of readers is probably the worst measure because it's a false idol. Feedburner subscribers, retweets, time on site aren't much better because they don't measure the true performance of a blog - what fraction of a target audience the blog reaches.

In order for content marketing and blogs to be effective, the writing must have a target audience in mind. By focusing on that audience, bloggers build a brand in a scalable and cost-effective way. So engaging the very highest fractions of that audience possible is the best metric of success.

For example, this blog targets startup founders, managers and employees. I journal my education and thoughts in the hopes that others benefit from these learnings. In exchange, I'm trying to build recognition within the startup ecosystem. Each morning, I'd like to log into an analytics dashboard that showed me the fraction of entrepreneurs and startup employees I reached the day before. And ideally, which content resonated and why. Alas, there is no such tool....