Hey bloggers, yesterday I was with some friends and one of them started to ask me about my blog. I explained him what I do in my blog, giving to him a little idea about this big world called blogosphere. He surprised very much about what I do here , asking me who read my blog and how can I measure the success of it. That is a very good question… There are many factors that help you to measure your blog’s success giving you the hint if it’s good or bad.

This post attempts to provide how you can measure your blog’s success taking advantage of its statistics combined with its reader’s interaction.

How many people are reading your content?

Something very important in this career, is to know how many people are reading your content, and take advantages of these numbers. Using webmaster analyzers you can know this kind of statistics, knowing the exactly amount of people who visit your site daily. A good way to increase this number is using social media networks, those normally gives tons of traffic.

Amount of subscribers

This is may be the most obvious factor. Many people think that you can measure a blog’s success just looking its subscriber’s counter but really, it’s more than that. It’s truth that you can get an idea about how successful a blog is just seeing the amount of subscribers, but you can assure nothing. I going to give you a example, what about a blog with 3 years of age and only 1000 subscribers ? if you don’t know the blog, seeing 1000 readers you can think that it’s awesome but may be it’s not really. But if you take a look on Jonh Cow for example, when his blog has about 5 months of age, it had about 700 subscribers and now it has thousand of subscribers.

Moral: The number of subscribers is important, but you need to consider the time in which you obtained your subscribers.

Subscriber’s chart of Mr. Javo dot Com

In this graph you can see how my daily subscribers has increased weekly up to this date. I think it’s good what do you think?

Comments per post

The next important factor is the number of comments on your blog. The number of comments per post gives you a idea about the quality of your blog, if it’s good it will create a atmosphere of discussion between you and your visitors. Answering your reader’s questions and paying attention to their critiques you will improve you relation with them, creating in your blog a nice place to stay.

Your achievements in social networks

All the achievements you obtain in the social networks it’s very related to your blog’s success. Using this kind of networks ( digg, stumbleupon, blogcatalog …. ) you will start to make contact with other bloggers, you will start to attract their attention and they will start to visit your blog over and over again looking for new content… Doing a good role in all those social networks, you will promote your blog, make friends and gain new readers, all at the same time, definitively exploding your traffic.

Backlinks

The backlinks or links which point back to your blog are a good indicative of how popular is your blog. While more backlinks you have more traffic you will get, and traffic on the blogosphere is synonymous of success . You can get backlinks by commenting on blogs with dofollow, discussing in communities or forums, exchanging links with other bloggers for blogrolling etc etc… You can learn more about how to get backlinks in this post.

Mr. Javo dot Com Backlinks @ 03/05/2008 ~ Note: I have more than 200 reactions on technorati, that statistic is bad

To finish, you may know that first that you can measure a success, you need to set goals. Don’t public them if you don’t want, but you need to set goals weekly or monthly. This way you will always have a goal to reach, applying effort and dedication every time to reach them.

You should check all this aspects and ask you questions like: how many people are reading my blog? I’m being amiable with them? I’m participating sufficiently in social communities?…answering all those kind of questions you can determinate if you are getting success with your blog or not, and if you think that you need to focus in a determinate task, go ahead, set your priorities and don’t worry about that, everybody neglects something in the life.

Today someone send me an email asking me for a page which he added to him bookmarks and today he tried to visit it and it was impossible to him. The page was not deleted, I just changed something in the permalink but he got an 404 Error Page. The 404 or Not Found error message is a HTTP standard response code indicating that the client was able to communicate with the server but either the server could not find what was requested, or it was configured not to fulfill the request and not reveal the reason why. 404 errors should not be confused with “server not found” or similar errors, in which a connection to the destination server cannot be made at all.

However this issue was good because it makes me notice that my 404 error page really sucks and I start to think how could I improve it…So I was thinking, in which circumstances someone get an 404 Error Page:

• When the url is written bad.
• When the url is deleted from the site.
• When the permalink is changed.

So I thought that is annoying when someone get a 404 message, the person is waiting to see the content and instead the person need to go back in the browser or verify the url. However that’s boring, so I will give you some tips to improve your 404 error page as I improved mine and give to the user a more pleasant sailing.

1. Be friendly with the user: ok may be this could be considered stupid but not everybody knows what a 404 error is. Normally this kind of pages only show a single message: “404 Error - Not Found” or something like that. The experimented user know what it means, but if you are not an Internet lover, you surely won’t know what to do. In this case, you need to tell them what’s happening, a little message explaining it is sufficient for this.
2. Include a search bar: if the user couldn’t find something, you need to help him to find it! how? if he is interested in something specific, he’ll want to find it, so what’s better than a search bar? a good and simply search bar could solve the problem, adding it to your 404 error page could help the users to find their wants.
3. Offer personal assistance: exist the case that the user simply can’t find what he is looking for. In this case you should offer personal assistance, let them know that you are willing to help them finding what they want. Placing a link to the contact form will be enough in addition of a little note.
4. Offer other posts: may be they can’t find what they want because simply the content does not exist on your blog. What should you do in this cases? offering other posts could be a nice way to attract them to your blog. I used a wordpress plugin called Customizable Post Listings for this, it let you to set random posts where you want with a simple php function: you can set the number of posts, the format of them, the author of them…inclusively you can set categories, so the plugin will only show random posts under these categories.

Building a 404 error page could be simple, but it’s very important for any website because depending of how is it configured, the users can leave or stay in the site when they can’t find what they want.

Happy blogging!

Everybody in the blogsphere talk about backlinks, and may be you can’t understand what are they talking about, but really the meaning of backlink is very simple. A backlink is an incoming link to a website, is any link received by a web page, directory, website, blogs etc etc… from another website. The Backlinks are also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links.

How are they useful to my website?

 

The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of your blog or website. While more backlinks you have, more higher will be your popularity and ranking on search engines. A backlink represent like your signature, getting backlinks for everywhere means like if you were in all those sites, imagine what would you think if you visit 30 sites and you see my banner or link for example, you probably will think “this guy is everywhere, he’s popular!”

Search engines often use the number of backlinks that a website has as one of the factors for determining that website’s search engine ranking. For example, Google’s PageRank algorithm uses backlinks to help determine a site’s rank. Therefore, websites often employ various techniques called search engine optimization to increase the number of backlinks pointing to their website.

Due to the abuse of using paid links to improve Google partially updated their Page Rank Tool to pin against paid links providers and the forward link of sites. This action resulted in a significant decrease in Page Rank of many websites worldwide. However although many believe that Google penalizes people for having unrelated backlinks to their blogs/websites, this has never been confirmed.

Some techniques to gain Backlinks

There are many paths to consider when building links to your site or blog such as link baiting or blogroll link swapping. There are many techniques to get backlinks but I will provide you only the most commons.

• Submitting your blog in web directories and social networks: This is a good way to get some backlinks, submitting your blog in social networks, also in directories like BlogCatalog or Blogarama. You should search for directory sites that are indexed deep (with too many backlinks), directories that are specific to your niche/category and directories where your category is not too crowded (almost impossible). There is a list of 20 essential blog directories to submit your blog.
• Commenting on Dofollow blogs: Dofollow blogs are blogs that give you a backlink just for commenting at them, doing this you will start to generate backlinks to your site as you have no idea, but don’t be a spammer!. If you don’t know what’s Dofollow, please check my guest post on JoeTech.
• Exchanging links with other blogger: this is very common, you can see in the most of blogs a blogroll section. Try to visit and comment frequently in a blog and after some weeks, you could contact the blogger and ask for a link exchange.
• Buying Text Links or Banners: plus text links, the banners also provide you a backlink. Before to buy, try to do an exchange…

My ideas disappeared ! if you find another way to generate backlinks please comment it in this post!!

Backlink Tools

• BackLinkWatch: this website is able to track every backlink to your site.
• BackLinkSpot: this website can provide you blogs and websites with dofollow attributes, letting you to find where you can drop your link to drink some of the juice of search engines backlinks.
• Technorati: with technorati you can track your backlinks!, they call them “reactions“. Following them, you will find the blogs which drop a backlink to you.

As you could notice, is very important for every website or blog to get backlinks. This way you will improve your rank on search engines and attract more traffic to your web, attracting the people attention .

Hello readers and bloggers, sometime did you think about why your feedburner’s subscribers counter change suddenly? or why a day it shows 100 and the next one shows 80? you probably have the wrong idea about what this counter really shows. I found this information by looking in the feedburner dashboard, there is a “i” of information beside the statistics in your Feed Stats Dashboard. It is something like this:

So what’s about this counter? what it really shows?

Basically this counter shows the number of subscribers you got during the last day. This mean that the number that you see there, is the number of subscribers you got yesterday, and it’s delayed by a day so really you can see tomorrow how was your blog today. Thats the reason why when you are starting your blog, you see how this number variate a lot, from 2 to 30 and vice versa, because this number doesn’t shows the number of total subscribers to your blog.

Instead, if you choose in your dashboard a date range like “last 7 days” or “all time” this number will be the average number of subscribers for all of the days selected. This number provides a general understanding of the size of your subscriber base over a time period.

How this number is calculated ?

FeedBurner’s subscriber count is based on an approximation of how many times your feed has been requested in a 24-hour period. Subscribers is inferred from an analysis of the many different feed readers and aggregators that retrieve this feed daily. The subscribers’ number is not computed for browsers or bots that access your feed.

Subscribers counts are calculated by matching IP address and feed reader combinations, then using our detailed understanding of the multitude of readers, aggregators and bots on the market to make additional inferences.

What’s the reach ?

This is another factor related to the counter. Reach is the total number of people who have taken action ( viewed or clicked ) on the content in your feed. So if someone click over a link your counter will increase by 1.

Subscribers is a measure of how many people are subscribed to your feed. At any given time, you can expect that a certain percentage of this subscriber base is actively engaging with your content and this “Reach” measurement provides this additional insight.

Additionally, there may be people viewing your content beyond your known subscriber base. For example, they may view your content on a feed search engine or news filter site.

Reach aggregates both of these groups, providing an accurate and useful measurement of your true audience.

Learning about…

I received this question by mail and I hope this post helps to understand the basics of the feed counter. A feedcounter is one of the widgets that you can’t miss in your blog, it gives an idea to your readers about how “popular” is your blog and also can give you a percentage about how many people visit your blog daily.