Certainly blogs are important if your name is Huffington or Perez Hilton, but what about those of us who don't write about Justin Bieber and the latest Republican to have some dirty laundry set out on the clothesline?
The Cupboards blog began as a bit of an experiment and a bit of strategy. Few local kitchen and bath shops have a consistently updated stream of aimless stuff carefully thought out information that shows a current online presence and really, that's what the mission was from the get go. The past couple of months with a fairly good increase in traffic, the mission hasn't really changed but the new wrinkle of staying interesting has emerged.
Not everything on the Cupboards blog is relevant to the kitchen and bath industry. Because our business is a very personal one, lots of the personality of the real people that work here comes out. Is that a bad thing? Does it make us look less than professional?
Part of what has made the Cupboards process work is that we are real people that want to help our customers achieve the end result of the project at hand. That always takes a personal touch. Potential customers can look at our blog, our twitter, come by our shop and they'll see the same thing. Real, live people who do real life things.
Measuring the success of our blog is a different monster. Everyone measures success in a different way and fortunately, the good folks at
Technorati did the research for me-
So... you Hobby Bloggers just revel in your blog, eh? I tried to figure out where Cupboards fit in- we'll say "all". I don't blog as my full-time job(so part-time), it is a business blog and technically since Cupboards is our venture it's kind of a self-employment, too.
Looking over Cupboards blog statistics for the past couple months I have decided to measure success based on one metric that probably falls under "Business Leads" or "Other". My measure of success is how much traffic we get based on people that are either looking for us specifically, or end up on a page because of a specific topic search. If people use a search engine and find us that is a win for me. Fortunately, the statistical software that I use shows what's being searched for and on what search engine.
Are we making the grade? Who's to decide, really? Each month traffic gets better and more people say, "Oh, I saw **** on your site!" Win.
Love this one. See that "I am better known in my industry" category? I'll gladly take a seat there, though the one right above it is a bit tempting, too.
So to wrap up the ramble, bloggers to me have a bit of a narcissistic streak about them. Most love their own blog and probably view it higher than most others do. Other's are truly there to share expertise and some just clog up the stream with chatter. Blogs are one cog in the ever-changing social media world and blogging is the social media long-hand. We're just glad to play along!
Click on this tag and then go read other bloggers take a shot at this topic.