Measuring law blog success : Web stats are not the answer
Lawyers and law firms obsess over blog and website stats. How many page views? How many visitors to my blog? How many subscribers do we have? How does this compare to other law blogs?
But page views, visitors, and subscribers aren't measures of success for law blogs. An enhanced reputation in your niche area of the law, growth in business, and a greater sense of professional & personnel worth are the goals - they're the measures of success.
Darren Rowse, a leading blog consultant and publisher, asked yesterday, 'Who Cares How Many Subscribers You’ve Got?' Darren used this diagram of web of relationships between the different determiners which lead to the outcomes that you're really looking for. As lawyers, substitute enhanced reputation and business growth for ad revenue.
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I'm in agreement with Darren on what to focus on.
- Quality of content. Share your insight and commentary with a view on what's valuable to your target audience.
- Community interaction. Interact with leading bloggers and reporters in your niche by citing their content in your blog posts and adding your commentary. Interact with your readers by asking them questions and responding to their emails and comments. Add those you interact with to social networks ala LinkedIn.
- SE0. No brainer, but often overlooked or wrongly assumed things will take care of themselves. Your blog's software architecture, blog titles, blog formats, and tagging are all things you control. All heavily impact getting your content seen by those searching on Google. Too many lawyers publish content never found on search.
- Content quantity or effort. Post once a week minimum. Two or three times a week to begin for SEO and to attract readers.
As in all things, worry about what you can control. Forget about those things you do not control.
I've never had a lawyer or law firm hire LexBlog because they wanted stats. They wanted things more real and substantial - an enhanced reputation, growth in business, and a greater sense of professional & personnel worth. To achieve those things through blogging focus on quality content, interaction, SEO, and effort.
This post is right on the mark. I know there are many other law blogs that have more subscribers and receive more visitors each week than my blog. But each and every week I continue to see work come as a result of my blog or other opportunities come my way because of the blog. It is the single best thing I have done for marketing in my legal career. Hands down.
I don't need a lot of visitors to the blog, just the "right" visitors.
Rush
I agree that stats are not the only measure of a law blog's success. They are, however, not completely unimportant.
For one thing, before business starts rolling in like it does for Rush, it gives you some sense of making some progress. Having other bloggers link to my blog and comment on my posts is also nice and perhaps more important, but that's not going to happen every single day.
I also like to look at stats about which posts seem to be most popular because it helps me know what my current audience is most interested in.
You're both right.
As you get started, it is nice to know that someone (hello world) is listening. If looking at stats, I tell folks to scan what people are reading, what they are searching for to get to your blog (though that's a self prophecy - what you write on is what brings people on search), what referrers are/who is linking to your posts, and the gradual increase in unique visitors (though that levels off).
If you do want stats, number one thing is sharing what you think your readers will find of interest that you find in your feeds. That results in good content which will include a link to a blog or news site that has existing readers - they see you, subscribe to you, and share your content with others. That's quality, interaction with blogosphere, and quantity.
I think this debate over stats has a couple of components, including one that is often overlooked -- most sitemeters are horribly unreliable in my opinion and give vastly inflated portraits of traffic and exist chiefly to make bloggers feel good about themselves. Stats like hits or page views or whatever, taken by themselves, are no accomplishment. Instead, if you are getting e-mails, comments, calls from reporters, speaking invitations, links from other bloggers, then you are doing something right. These things don't happen unless there is some kind of decent traffic, of course, but focusing on building stats is a fool's errand. Figure out who you want to talk to and what you want to talk about, and do it with creativity and passion. No one wants to read boring, overly cautious folderol. We can pick up any legal brief for that. Writers who reward their readers with excellent work will be rewarded, in time, with loyalty, reputation, opportunities and clients. And you'll have a great time and meet some terrific people you never would have known otherwise. Stats should be seen only as a manifestation of the other goals, not as a goal in itself.