Blog web stats not true measure of success

Blog traffic stats does not measure blog success, says Steve Rubel at MicroPersuasion.

…[T]raffic is not the primary way to measure a blog’s impact. Like PR, the return on investment is more soft, not hard. This needs to be taken into account. For example, if your goal is to promote thought leadership, I would track mentions on Google, media references to the blog, PubSub counts and more. If search engine optimization is your blogs purpose, traffic is surely important but then again so are the kinds of keywords that searchers are using to arrive at your blog site. Are they the right keywords?

Somewhere between the Web 1.0 way of measuring sites and the emerging Web 2.0 yardsticks (links, Google Juice, mindshare, relationships generated, etc.) there’s a happy medium when it comes to benchmarking your blog.

Couldn’t agree more. Too many lawyers and professional services businesses get all freaked out by web stats. How many hits? How may page views? How many page views? Isn’t that like measuring stats at a football game and then losing the game.

Truer measures of success are how many new contacts you may be getting. Having an archive of content, easily navigated and searched by your target audience. How many places you are cited as an authority in your niche area of expertise. How many time times you are interviewed. How many new clients you get. I’d look to these items as a measure of success.