If you ain’t got no goals, you ain’t got nothin’.
I am sure there is a country music song about KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) and that song probably has the above chorus line. :)
There are three primary goals for this blog.
My über goal with my writings on this blog is to aspire to do what this fantastic quote states:
“The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.”
~ Edwin Schlossberg.
Beyond that you are here and hence already aware that I am quite obsessed with Web Insights, both qualitative and quantitative components. I have set goals for the blog in both of those areas, goals that will help measure a couple facets of success.
For this blog comments are a fantastic way for me to “measure” qualitative input, call it customer satisfaction or call it Voice of the Customer. So please keep sharing your comments, they are deeply appreciated.
My qualitative goal: Atleast 6 user comments per post.
For the quantitative I plan to use Technorati rankings to measure success. On paper Technorati’s premise is that if you publish content that people find useful then they will link to you, hence “voting” for a higher ranking, and a blog that adds value will have a higher Technorati ranking. My plan is do exactly that, publish great value add content and measure success.
[Everything below is for historical purposes only! I was tracking it at the start of the blog. For how I measure holistic success of this blog please see this post: Blog Metrics: Six Recommendations For Measuring Your Success.]
My quantitative goal: Technorati top 10,000 by the end of this year, 2006.
Today, on May 31th 2006, that would translate into roughly 530 links from 162 sites (!!!), and the way blogs are growing the goal becomes tougher with each passing day. I don’t know that there are 162 plus websites that might be interested in the subject matter of this blog but we’ll see. (If you do have a blog in this area of interest please let me know.)
Goal Progress:
| Date | Technorati Rank | Technorati: Links / Sites |
Alexa Rank |
| 15 May ‘06 (Start) | 1,200,157 | 0 / 0 | 1,609,077 |
| 17 May ‘06 | 211,031 | 34 / 14 | – |
| 24 May ‘06 | 142,914 | 56 / 20 | 521,486 |
| 26 May ‘06 | 128,020 | 58 / 22 | – |
| 30 May ‘06 | 109,958 | 73 / 28 | 354,810 |
| 07 Jun ‘06 | 85,087 | 88 / 35 | 307,190 |
| 13 Jun ‘06 | 61,940 | 129 / 45 | 258,694 |
| 20 Jun ‘06 | 41,556 | 207 / 62 | 239,961 |
| 27 Jun ‘06 | 33,828 | 272 / 74 | 197,771 |
| 04 Jul ’06 | 28,566 | 282 / 86 | 177,666 |
| 11 Jul ’06 | 20,198 | 328 / 108 | 142,544 |
| 18 Jul ’06 | 18,527 | 382 / 126 | 93,243 |
| 25 Jul ’06 | 17,691 | 399 / 134 | 84,039 |
| 01 Aug ’06 | 13,187 | 496 / 173 | 81,634 |
| 08 Aug ’06 | 11,740 | 551 / 192 | 81,634 |
| 15 Aug ’06 | 9,744 (Yea!!) | 622 / 225 | – |
| Switching to bi-monthly | |||
| 29 Aug ’06 | 8,831 | 697 / 255 | – |
| 12 Sept ’06 | 7,985 | 768 / 277 | 73,593 |
| 26 Sept ’06 | 6,853 | 897 / 329 | 72,291 |
| 10 Oct ’06 | 5,509 | 1,051 / 396 | 68,132 |
| 24 Oct ’06 | 4,625 | 1,123 / 431 | 77,277 |
This posting reminds me I have much to learn about how to influence my website rankings. My site has already been on-line three months and I aim to utilize as many useful tools as possible to empower as many people as possible. To date, I have yet to investigate Alexa ranking systems. I encourage visitors to vote for my site through technorati, yahoo, google, and netvibes. I offer the option of RSS feeds.Although my visitors are growing, I haven’t yet found an effective strategy to encourage more interaction with visitors on blog or forums. People will email or not write at all. I have statistical goals for increasing traffic, but I haven’t yet reached them. My goal of empowering more visitors is hard to accurately measure without more feedback.
Awesome – I mean I haven’t seen somebody so particular about the blog goal. This analysis has actually made me align to your context – as you mentioned “The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think”
Thanks
-Ashish
pluGGd.in
I checked your PR and Alexa rank. It’s a great motivating factor for bloggers like me… I’m also going to make some real goals considering my strength and weaknesses, thank you for showing the way.
Avinash, you did it again.
Ripped my head off and made me completely rethink both my own AND my client’s blogging programs.
Dude, you are a classic “beautiful mind” when it comes to these deeply technical, yet wonderfully insightful prose.
Avinash, I am in Seattle monthly (I live and have my businesses in Vancouver, WA, next to Portland, Oregon).
Let me buy you lunch or dinner sometime soon. You’ve inspired me on a Sunday when crafting valuable reports for my clients has just been boosted another few notches.
To your continued success,
Mark Alan Effinger
RichContent.tv
Avinash,
I’ve stumbled upon your blog, and have also been impressed – not only with your content, but with how you set goals for your blog in stone. That’s pretty cool!
I think that I will start using these types of metrics for my clients as well!
Great goals. I’m impressed with your success and hope to be as successful myself. Some feedback for blog.cubicledropout.com
Thanks
I like your goals, and I have a similar set of goals (although quite a bit less ambitious initially). How did you get 14 sites to link to you in your first 2 days? The beginning seems like it is always the hardest part, and you really got off to a bang. Did it come from just posting a ton and linking to others, or did you have a different startup strategy?
Thanks,
Danny
I am facinated by your blog. Can I ask you one question? I just recently started a blog for my music band what if I get negative comments on my blog? Has this ever happened to you?
Hi Avinash,
Thank you for being the inspiration for our wordpress plugin that helps you monitor your blog goals. If you get chance please take a look. You can set your blog goals like Comments/post, Posts/month, Comments for each post etc.
You are the first person outside of our development that we are notifying about this plugin.
Regards
Mark
Here is the link to the plugin http://www.dashboardzone.com/monitor-your-blog-goals-with-wordpress-plugin
I tried everything to find my goals before I have no idea of what is best for me.Now I have come to realize that:No pains no gains.
I like these words:“The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.”which remind me how to write correctly from now now
Helpful post as I research blog goal-setting before starting one for our campus. Ours will have a regional focus and isn’t likely to draw hundreds of links from other sites, so I’m not holding my breath over our Technorati ranking :D.
One comment, though–number of comments per post is a quantitative measure, not qualitative. If you evaluated the content of the comments (this comment should count as positive :D), that would be qualitative.
If you’re using number of comments as a measure of engagement, that moves it toward the qualitative, but it’s still a numerical data point, to me. Or am I missing something?
@BarbChamberlain
Director of Communications and Public Affairs
Washington State University Spokane
@WSUSpokane
http://www.spokane.wsu.edu
Barb: Please see this post for a more nuanced take on how to measure success of a blog:
http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2007/11/blog-metrics-six-recommendations-for-measuring-your-success.html
On to your question….
I 100% agree that it is a quantitative measure. I have not yet found a good enough sentiment analysis tool (see my latest post on that: http://tr.im/GdfB). I am sure that problem will go away with time, until then my mantra is: “all conversation is good conversation!”. :)
If you want to really get a peek into the qualitative try word clouds of the comment stream, it gives a nice, atleast first blush, grasp of what’s going on.
Avinash.
Hello Avinash,
I just came through here, and wondered if you’ve gotten new goals for your blog this year.
All the best :)
Tal