Measuring Blog Performance - How to Set Business Blog Goals That Will Bring in Clients

Measuring Blog Performance - How to Set Business Blog Goals That Will Bring in Clients

Service professionals -- those professionals who deliver services to their clients, such as accountants, lawyers, physicians, consultants and others -- are finally beginning to realize that blogging can convert people into clients. Getting a blog, however, is just the first step. The next and primary task is producing excellent content. To their credit, most professionals who blog realize this.

But how do you know whether your content is working?

First, we must define what we mean by "working." It's not a cop-out when I say that "it depends." Every blogger -- even "every law blogger" -- even "every solo lawyer practicing bankrupty in Texas" -- will and should have slightly different goals. The key point is to have a goal, or goals, and know how to measure your blog's performance relative to that goal.

Some suggestions for professionals:

• Raising traffic by x percentage over y number of months
• A certain number of downloads of your ebook
• Conversion rate of visitors who use your contact form to request more information or an appointment
• Increasing the number of comments on each post

These are just a few ideas. Begin by taking a few moments to look at your blog critically and make some determinations as to what specific aspects of your blog you'd like to work on. I suggest choosing no more than two or three goals at first.

Why not focus on just one goal at a time? While you can certainly do that, I don't think it's necessary. While life coaches urge clients to set just one goal at a time, blogs are a different matter. Individuals are complex machines, with complicated contexts of their own. Blogs? Not so much. The actions you take to improve one parameter of your blog's performance will probably have a significant impact on other parameters as well. So, why not measure both?

Once you've determined what aspects of your blog's performance you want to work on, refine your goals into SMART ones:

S -- Specific: Your goals must be as narrowly drawn as possible. Don't simply state "I want more visitors." How many more visitors? To what page or pages? In what time frame?

M -- Measurable: "I want a better reputation among my peers" is a worthy goal, but it isn't measurable as it's written. Look at expressions of your goal that can be tracked with analytics.

A -- Actionable: Select goals that can be implemented by actions or tasks, rather than "sit back and wait for it" goals.

R -- Relevant: Only choose goals that are relevant to the purpose of professional services business blogging â€" to convert readers to clients, ultimately. Getting a link from a famous celebrity blogger is nice, but unless she's endorsing your services or bringing you targeted traffic, what does it matter?

T -- Time-bound: Select a reasonable time frame for the achievement of your goals.

By setting specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, time-bound goals for your blog's performance, you'll give structure to your blogging efforts, both in terms of the content you write and the administrative tasks you perform.