In Can I Get My Blog Noticed Without Digg’s Help? I asked whether social sites were indeed the "silver bullet" to quickly gain a large and lasting audience for a fledgling blog.  To test the theory I proposed using my own blog to measure the impact produced by different techniques.  Today we’ll tackle the first part of the experiment – baseline current blog performance, and establish an approach for measuring any change in its popularity.

Step 1 – Measures

A quick search on Google turned up some useful articles on measuring blog performance.  The two I found most interesting were Tips For Measuring Success Of Your Blog (365 Days In Numbers) and Measuring your blog rank.  Based upon their advice I’ve decided to measure the following:

Site Metrics

• Contribution: The timing and raw metrics of my posts.  Measured by post quantity and word count.
• Conversations: The level of feedback per post.  Given I’m mostly planning to write technical how to and tip style articles I don’t really know how relevant this is, but I’ll capture it anyway.  Measure is average comments per post.

Site Analytics

• Readers: The number of unique readers for blog posts.  Measured via unique visitor counts, page views and feed subscriptions.

Social Feedback

• Blog Ranking: The relative standings of blogs as calculated by sites such as Technorati.  This will be used as a competitive measure of blog popularity.
• Bookmarking: The number of links to my blog from sites such as del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, and furl.  This will be treated as a rough measure of quality, assuming readers only bookmark pages they believe worthy of being revisited.
• Readers: The number of unique readers for blog posts.  Alexa, Compete and similar sites extrapolate these figures from the web surfing habits of a representative sample of users.  I’m only monitoring this out of curiosity as I don’t believe it will be relevant for either my blog niche or location (they tend to be biased towards US readership)..

Site metrics will be gathered using the GeneralStats WordPress plugin.  The remaining measurement techniques will be discussed below, with thanks to suggestions from "6 key ways to measure your blog’s success" by Mashable. 

Site Analytics

Google Analytics is already installed so this will be the mainstay of the site analytics measurement.  In addition I will be trying two of Mashable’s suggestions:  QuantCast and Spotplex.  At this stage its unclear what advantages (if any) they will provide over my existing analytics tool but I’m willing to review them to find out.

Feedburner is also in use so RSS reader statistics will be gathered using this service.

Social Feedback

Due to the effort involved in individually capturing results from the numerous social sites I’ll be using, social feedback measurement will be via results obtained from aggregator services.  SocialMeter captures ratings from a selection of bookmark sites, social sites, and search engines and turns them into a single social rating,  popuri.us has some overlap with SocialMeter but includes other big players mentioned by Mashable so will be monitored as well.  The use of aggregator sites does mean I will only directly track some of the social sites I’m planning to use, but it should still provide a pretty good snapshot of social standing so I don’t see this being a problem.

Please note I will not be using the SocialMeter score itself.  Given my blog is starting up the Sphere ranking is significantly skewing the results with a "related posts" count, without reflecting blog popularity.  In fact I’d go so far as to say the score would be inversely proportional to popularity as a high Sphere ranking means I have lots of blogs to compete with, where as a lower Sphere score means better chances of my posts being found via a search engine.

Step 2 – Baseline

Time for a sobering look at the current blog position.  As this is only my 7th post I didn’t expect much and the results match expectations.   On the positive side the only way to go is up! 

Next Steps

Now I understand my current blog ranking and how I will track changes in its popularity, the next step is to submit posts to social bookmarking sites and track the impact to my blog’s standing.  I look forward to sharing those results with you next week!