If you have ever felt like you were blogging to a wall, you know how difficult it can be to engage your audience. During the first few weeks or even months after starting your own corporate blog, there are going to be dry periods where you are writing for a handful of people. This is the most frustrating period and many bloggers pull up stakes. However, if you can begin writing more effective posts, you will start to see an increase in readers.

So, how do you that? There are many ways that you can gauge the overall effectiveness of your blog. We’re going to look at the two most important ways and provide tips on gauging and improving your effectiveness. Let’s get started!

Reader Effectiveness

This can be a tough one to gauge, at least at first, but you can learn a lot if you take the time to do your research. You will need to make sure that you have analytics software installed on your blog (Google Analytics is one of the best and it is free). This is going to be one of your main tools when it comes to figuring out how you are impacting your readers.

There are three main ways to gauge whether or not you are reaching your readers:

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

All three are vital to your corporate blog – but it’s not always easy to improve this area. First, start by including your audience in the discussion. Ask them direct questions, encourage them to leave comments, and keep up the conversation with them. Little by little, you’ll notice more interaction and your blog will begin to pick up steam.

Search Engine Effectiveness

While the results from this can be a bit slow to realize, you should start to see something happening if you are blogging effectively for search engines. You can gauge this by:

1. How high your Google Page Rank is.
2. How many new links you have coming in to your blog
3. How well your blog does in results pages
4. How many people are entering your site from search engines (see analytics)

If you are using keywords and not seeing your blog anywhere in the search results for that keyword, there is something wrong. Either you are picking keywords that simply have too much popularity, or you are not using them the right way.

Density is vital when it comes to keywords. You’ll need to include the phrase in the title of your post, in the first and last sentence and throughout the post. A good rule of thumb is to shoot for 2 to 3% density on your keywords or phrases. This will make a big difference.

If you are using keywords where there are already millions of results, fine tune your approach. For example, instead of real estate, you can use the keywords Montana Real Estate. Focus on long tail keywords as well to start building up solid results.

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Originally posted 2008-09-17 05:46:26. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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