Measuring the health of your blog
Posted by Patrick on February 6th, 2006
How do you know how well your blog is doing? One of the things you can do is to monitor the number of page views your blog is receiving with the idea that the number of page views should increase over time for successful blogs. There are two problems with that approach. The first being that the total number of page views and growth there of does not accurately correlate with the ?Äúsuccess?Äù of a blog. It is possible to have a very successful niche specific blog with a small target audience with not much growth over time. The second problem with this measurement is that it doesn?Äôt quantify the most important variable in blogging ?Äì conversations. If you don?Äôt have conversation in your blog then you don?Äôt have much. So what we need is a formula for measuring a blogs conversation coefficient.
That is precisely what Stowe Boyd did the other day in his blog. You can read the original post here with the follow up post here. The crux of his theory is that successful blogs — ones that were currently viable and vibrant, and those that were on a growth trajectory from their start — shared a common characteristic: The ratio between posts and comments+trackbacks. Thus the Conversational Index (CI)= (Comments+Trackbacks)/Posts. This means the CI gets larger as the conversation gets richer.
While this may not be a perfect algorithm to measure a blog?Äôs true success, I do think it does provide a good picture of a blog?Äôs general health.
No related posts.
on February 6th, 2006 at 2:15 pm
It’s Boyd, not Boyde.
on February 7th, 2006 at 4:00 am
Sorry Stowe. Error fixed.