Once you have written a post, either on your own blog or on another one, you could want to know its effectiveness to apply the same strategy in the future posts. Normally, we study past posts to learn how the implemented keywords has influenced in its effectiveness.

What is Effectiveness for you?

I’m talking about effectiveness but I didn’t mention its meaning. I consider that a post was effective, when it brings me the bigger number of traffic, attract the bigger quatity of subscribers or when it gives me a sale. Sometimes you can write a post with a good title and great content, but if it brings you just a little number of readers, you can’t consider it as effective. In these cases, you could try to promote it, this way you could explode its potential.

Beside that, there are another factors which can help you to recognize an effective post:

• Inbound Links: The inbound/incoming links, also known as links pointing to your post, can be a good indicative of how effective was your post. The more inbound links you get, the more effective it was. This means that your post shook the blogosphere and it is being commented in many blogs. Intead, if you didn’t get any inbound links, you know what it means…
• Comments: I think this is one of the best factors which help you to recognize when your post was or not effective. The more comments you get, the more effective it was. This is obvious, if you get several comments it’s because your post rocks! Surely it is very controversial or interesting.
• Votes: The votes a post can get in the social media networks certainly helps you to recognize if the post was good or bad. If you visit the front page of Digg for example, you can see articles with 500 votes or more, and a post is not there for nothing! Surely it is very informative and catchy.

These 3 elements, combined with the other ones mentioned in the first parragraph can help you a lot to recognize the effectiveness of a post. Some time ago, I invited a blogger to read one of my posts, and minutes later he bought an 125×125 ad on my blog. What happened there? He really liked the content and he decided to buy me a spot, so that was my proof to recognize the potential of that post.

What next?

Once you have recognized an effetive post, you need to do two things. The first one, promote it! It could be a good way to attract new subscribers, helping you to impose your authority on a niche. Advertising on StumbleUpon could be a good idea, because it’s relatively cheap and it can bring you a lot of traffic.

The second thing you should do, is to optimize it to be a good landing page, where the people can visit, get stuck and subscribe to your blog .