Measuring your blog’s effectiveness

Companies, from the largest such as GM, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, to the smaller, such as law firms, are publishing marketing blogs in increasing numbers. How can one tell if they are working is the subject of good a piece by Zachary Rodgers at Jupiter News.

Bob Cargill, senior creative director for Yellowfin Direct Marketing and author of a company blog on direct marketing issues nails it as far as law firms should be concerned: “We’re ‘expertizing’ ourselves, so that when people think of direct marketing, they’ll think of me and of Yellowfin… I feel our blog attracts a quality prospect.”

Other folks offered Rodgers all kinds of ways to measure the success of blogging:

• Personalizing your company. “It may not be measured yet, but Robert Scoble’s done more for Microsoft than McCann Erickson ever did,” said Hugh MacLeod, a marketing consultant and author of the gapingvoid blog, referring to the employee blogger who’s credited with giving the software giant a human face. “I’ve been in advertising 15 years, and what he’s done is the most tangible ‘let’s move the goal posts, gang’ effort I’ve seen.”
• Immediate feedback from prospects. Cargill thinks “…you have a better chance of measuring a blog’s effectiveness than a PR or an ad campaign, because you have the direct interaction between you and your prospects,” he said. …..I can write an article on my blog and know pretty quickly how popular that post is. You’re self-correcting with each and every post, because you’re listening to what others are saying about you and reacting. With direct mail [campaigns], we usually get just a ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ With a blog, we get qualitative feedback.”
• Hard measurements. Trackbacks (tracks posts on other blogs linking to your blog), comments posted to your blog and search engine results for relevant keywords and key phrases.
• New clients. Guess this is what it is all about. Steve Rubel, a PR executive with CooperKatz and publisher of Micropersuasion, reports his blog has brought in “…at least two blog-referred clients [who] are generating significant revenue, and the firm is in talks with several other leads generated through Micro Persuasion.

I kind of like what my buddy Rubel had to say best in conceding he was not using any methodology to track the success of his blog. “I don’t have the time,” he said. “But I kind of feel like it’s been working.”

I’ll confess as well. I do not look at much in the form of stats anymore. I just like having the reputation as a national expert on Internet marketing and the use of professional marketing blogs – all after only 8 months of actively publishing my own blog. Wow, as Cargill puts it – I’ve been ‘expertized.’

When law firms think of professional marketing blogs, they think of me. This results is a lot of new work for our company, LexBlog. That’s measurement enough.