Have you checked if your readers are still with you?

Blogging can easily make you blind. With all that respect, popularity and celebrity status you think you have, it’s easy to get carried away. You slowly migrate from interesting things to personal things, move away from the purpose of your blog while you still think that you are doing a great job. Quite possible isn’t it?

There are blogs that started off with one topic, then later on more user participation, moved to another and finally got nowhere when it moved to yet another topic. It’s quite natural.

Because, your good times, are easy to measure. And you being a blogging enthusiast will count the smallest thing to your credit.Won’t you?

Now, how would you know if your readers are bored or not? How would you know if they are really interested in your content or not? Let’s see.

- RSS Readers
First and foremost metric that should give you an idea on how many people think that you’re cool. If the numbers soar you know you are making a wave, but if the numbers enter into a stagnated phase with no increase in any given time period, I think it’s safe to assume that there needs to be a major repairing done.

- Comments
Comments are directly related to your popularity. While it’s true that only less than 10% of your readers will take the pain in commenting on your blog, it is also true that to pursue that 10% to comment, itself is a big thing. Monitoring your comment ratio will help you decide if you are getting your readers hooked or not. Take the number of posts and compare it to the number of comments you have received in any given time period. If there are more posts than comments, it might be a wise decision to write more interesting posts.

- Page views
Page views means the engagement ratio. The more interested your readers are the more will be the page views. It also means that there are enough stuff on your website that is keeping them engaged. If you have a lower page view ratio make sure you give options like related posts and other interesting posts that may increase the page views.

- Direct hits
Direct hits are hard to get. Out of the total traffic direct hits form only less than 10%. Direct hits also means how many people recall your brand name. So if you have a high direct hit ratio, it’s a good sign that readers are coming back to you. A lower one is not bad either but normal. But if you follow your traffic sources and find that the number of direct hits are less, it might be something that you should look into.

Like the above there are other metrics like the number of incoming links that can be measured to see if your blog is performing well or not. An abnormal dip in any of the above metrics means it’s time you looked into writing that killer article and got some link juice and traffic to rejuvenate your blog.