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Discussion on: How to Write a Good Blog Post

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taillogs profile image
Ryland G

That's a very good question. For me, engagements and views are the primary metric because I don't have a call to action. If I had to a call to action, conversions would be my defining metric. Obviously, the accuracy of your measurement is heavily dependent on how well you understand your content and the market. For example, if I post a machine learning post on Dev.to and it gets 1000 views, that's a pretty good post. If I post the same content on Reddit and it gets 10000 views, that is equally successful (relatively).

With Dev.to it's really hard because they don't really give me a ton of information. With my personal blog site, I have a couple google analytics scripts that present my posts in terms of average read time, % of twitter follow, etc. I think comments are the best way to validate "successful" post because if you get comments but minimal views, it probably means its a good post for the wrong audience.

Thanks for taking the time to ask a great question like this. I should have talked about it in the core post!

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daedtech profile image
Erik Dietrich • Edited

I think defining success for blog posts could be its own standalone post, if not series.

Personally, I've developed a content planning system that involves each post having a (usually KPI-driven) mission. So, for me, success is "does it achieve the mission."

Missions might involve raising awareness of a concept (page views), getting people to click through to an asset (CTR), courting buyers (conversion rate), reaching new readers (social shares), or simply hobby blogging on my own site (did I enjoy writing the post). Anyway, it's a big topic.

FWIW, regarding measuring dev.to content performance outside of the medium itself, you can see in aggregate how it drives traffic to your site with your analytics. For instance, I'm attaching an image of referrals for one my sites over the last few days. If you go from there and add the secondary dimension of landing page, you can see which bacaklinks on dev.to are interesting readers the most and driving click-throughs, especially if you use UTM codes in those URLs.

Anyway, if you hadn't seen that before, I've found it's a helpful way to measure potential audience growth potential of share/syndication sites, even when those sites are sort of opaque with internal metrics and analytics. You can't really tell, say, time on page, but you can infer that it's pretty good if you have a high click-through rate on a link near the bottom of the post.