Blog Success: It’s the Linkable Content, Folks

Zen Zoomie’s Place: Chronicles of a (Wannabe) Pro Blogger wrote How the Great Blogs Began: The First Posts, with a spart two in the series, featuring Lorelle on WordPress.

I was surprised to find that my blog has been selected as part of his series, but more important was the stats being used to measure a blog’s success. To which I challenged:

I don’t think that stats really speak well for a truly good analysis of what makes a successful blog. Your descriptions of why they are “successful”, though I’m not clear about your definition of success, is good, and the most valuable part. Online numbers have long been easily manipulated and screwy. Hopefully they’ll come up with better stats somewhere in time.

If I were to sum up all the years of experience blogging (and before blogging was blogging), I would say that the number one influencing factor in the “success” of a blog is its ability to create LINKABLE content, content worth linking to.

Goes back to the cave days when the story that became a legend was the one most entertaining to be told and thus, told many times, often beginning with the phrase, “Did you heard about…”

Zen Zoomie was delighted with my comment and featured it in a follow-up, What Makes a Successful Blog, where he explained:

All great points, and I couldn’t agree more..stats like Alexa traffic and Technorati rank have severe shortcomings as measures of “success”!

…My personal view is that if you’re talking about individual posts, there are two key things that let you know you were successful:

1. The number of readers that stick around to actually read the post (you can determine this using stats packages like pMetrics or Google Analytics), and
2. The number of long-term links your receive back to your post.

I’m not sure what’s meant by “long-term links”, unless that means quality links from quality blogs that are expected to “live” a long time, but the point is good.

Create content worthy of your readers and they will stick around, and write linkable content to help others find you and tell the world about what you have to say.

Then, what really makes a blog successful, in my mind, is the fact that the new content keeps them coming back for more and the old content keeps attracting new visitors, measured over the years, not the days.

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, member of the 9Rules Network, and author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.