When asked by clients how to measure how their blog is doing, I generally run through a little series of “visibility” tests to determine how vibrant and visible their blog is. Here are my personal steps, and I’d certainly be interested in hearing how others determine a blog’s success.

I recommend running through these steps generally within two-three months of a blog launch, and then periodically (depending on your curiousity/blog strategy) after. I’ve also included recommendations to boost your blog’s visibility. Once you’ve implemented them, you should begin to see improvements in engagement, readership and visibility.

Blog Search Engines - Register, Ping Them

1) Technorati - at the most basic level in Technorati (one of the most well known and well used blog search engines), you have the opportunity to claim your blog and profile it with tags, author information, etc. (your blog categories will be automatically generated into Technorati tags).

Once your blog is active, and have people commenting about it and linking to it, your Technorati Authority Ranking will be developed. A nice side benefit will be that the press will find your bloggers even more appealing as thought leaders.

The higher your Authority Ranking, the closer you are to the “top” of the blogosphere.

A general rule of thumb for new blogs is that an authority ranking of 25 or greater is getting significant. Authority is based on the number of inbound links, and other activity (posts, comments and trackbacks) in relation to other bloggers.

Recommendation: Join and claim your blog on Technorati. Then, once you have an account, be sure to ping Technorati every time you publish a new post. Pings can be set up to happen automagically in your blog software. It’s well documented on the ping page.

2) Similarly, add your blog to IceRocket (another popular blog search engine). And be sure to ping it every time you post. (Again, there are directions on how to have this happen automagically.)

3) Ask.com has a great blog search tool, which is remarkably free of spam blogs, or splogs. It will likely pick up your blog posts before many other blog search engines do - in my experience, if I don’t see results in other engines, I’m usually gratified to go to Ask. Whew.

4) Of course, Google’s blog search engine is a gold standard, and I like Google Blog’s Advanced Search options for their clarity and ease of use. Type in some keywords you’ve been using, and see where you come up…

Other Views of Visibility

5) Compete.com is a great place to see how you compare to others in your space. With a free account, you can check out how your blog compares to four other blogs, in terms of traffic, and how it has changed in the last month/last year; what are the most popular keywords driving traffic to the site, etc. You can upgrade to a paid version that will give more metrics, but it’s a pretty nice, quick way to see how you compete.

6) Quantcast is similar, in the sense that you can see nice demographic information of a site’s visitors (they’re offering the “Internet’s first cookie to people audience estimates” white paper online). You’ll likely (unless your organization is big) need to add a snippet of code to your blog to be able to gather statistics, but they describe how to do it here.

7) AideRSS is a wonderful tool to help you easily see which posts are “hot.” You input your blog feed (right click on your blog’s RSS feed button and copy link location) and it will show you what % of your posts are Good, Great, and Best posts – based on the number of people commenting on them, tagging them, etc.

Once you get traffic coming to your blog, you’ll be able to see what kinds of posts people resonate with most. Mine are all over the board… (click on the thumbnail below for a full view)

Recommendation: Have your bloggers start a delicious account and tag each others’ posts when they are published. It’ll add to the ecosystem of chatter about your blog and keywords… Bonus points for also establishing a mag.nolia account (it’s where the tech nerds hang out), and tagging posts there.

8 - YackTrack is a fun way to see who’s commenting on a particular blog post URL – even when they’re not commenting at that URL itself - they may be chattering about the topic or the post around the web. You can also put in important keywords to see what kind of chatter is out there on a particular keyword. You should put your company’s brand names into the chatter section and see who’s talking on Twitter, other social media sites.

9) Google Links: You can see how many people link to any web site by going into Google and typing in the URL with the word “Links:” in front, e.g. links:http://www.janetleejohnson.com. A healthy system of inbound links is (just as in search engine marketing) a key to visibility and vibrancy.

10) Comments beget comments. How many people comment on your posts? I don’t get a lot of comments on many of my posts, probably because I don’t comment on others’ as often as I should. But we also need to remember 99% of people reading blogs don’t comment. So if you want people to comment on your blog posts, go to other blogs and comment on theirs. It’s human nature to be curious about who’s commenting on your posts… If you get one from someone you don’t yet know, go find out who it is, and see what they have to say.

Every comment gives you the opportunity to put an inbound link right back to your blog. If you do nothing else, do this. Creating inbound links and conversations are extremely important to the health of your blog, and to its visibility to others. Your blog will remain an island as long as you stay only on it and don’t venture out…

Nothing will engender more visibility or engagement than outreach.

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