Now I don’t know about you, but when it comes to success, it’s pretty easy to measure in real-life right? I mean, you’d measure success by getting a promotion, a pay rise or buying a house. Most of us have life goals and when we achieve each one we can count that as a success. But when it comes to blogging, success is measured in a bit more of a subjective way. For some it could be getting a book deal, reaching 100,000 viewers a day or sitting FROW at every fashion week. For other’s it could be getting invited to blogging events, working with brands and PRs or earning enough to pay the bills each month. I mean that would be lovely!
So how can you measure blog success? Well honestly in so many different ways. Which is why I thought I’d share with you all some of the ways that I try and measure my own achievements when it comes to blogging:
IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT THE NUMBERS
I think most of us would agree that having a ‘high’ readership figure would equate to success. Right? But does it? What if you bought all your followers and faked your follower count? That doesn’t make you successful, that makes you a fraud. At the same time, do the numbers really matter if you can measure engagement….?
FOLLOWERS AND ENGAGEMENT
Which brings me nicely onto my next point, engagement. There’s no point having thousands of followers if no-one is engaging with your content. And by engaging I mean comments and likes on your posts, retweets and shares on your Twitter and Facebook pages, likes on your Instagram page and subscribers to your YouTube channel. From working with brands and PRs, I know they value engagement over followers. Plus as a creator, it’s what we want! We create content for people to engage with.
CONTENT
Speaking of content, it can be hard to measure success wise, but it’s a great way to measure if you’re hitting your goals. Did you blog five times this week like you wanted to? Did you promote each post on social media? Have you improved your photography skills? All of these are ways that you can measure how you’re developing as a blogger and that’s important. Especially as we know success does not happen overnight.
INVITES AND INCOME
Now for many, myself included, getting emails from PRs inviting you to launch events and fashion previews, or being offered sponsored content and gifts for review is a great feeling! It shows that brands and PRs are starting to notice your blog and all the hard work you’ve put into developing it into the awesome space it is. And for many, this is how they’ll measure success. For others success comes with being able to do this full time because you can earn enough to pay the bills.
HAPPINESS
And finally, let’s not forget that most of us started our blogs as a hobby because it made us happy. I know I certainly did. And when setting yourself goals and trying to measure your blog’s success it’s important to remember your own happiness. Do you still love to blog? Do you get excited to produce new content? Does blogging make you happy? These are the important things to consider when measuring success. As yes we’d all like our blogs to grow, for brands to want to work with us, for people to enjoy and engage with what we produce but the real success is us being able to do something that we love.
So however you choose to measure success, I think the key thing to remember is that each blog has its own views about what success looks like and as bloggers we each have our own goals that we want to achieve. So these have been some of the ways that I choose to measure my goals, but what does blog success mean to you?
