How Do You Measure A Blog's Success?

Dear Readers,

Some of you out there have your own blogs. Many are TG writers or captioners like myself.

Now, when I first started out I was just a guest captioner on a website called "Tamara Lynn's Tawdry Teasers". It got wiped out when Fortune City did a TG purge. Everybody then moved to Lycos Groups and that's when I first had a dedicated audience of sorts. I had a number of group members, and I could see the impact.

At the end of 2003 Lycos Groups went down and there was a split. Some went to Yahoo Groups like myself and the rest went to Smart Groups which wasn't smart at all because it went defunct.

In 2014 Yahoo Groups decided to update their format and it created more problems than it was worth. And thus after amassing over 5,000 members on Yahoo I started this blog.

So that's perspective. 

Here's some of my blog stats right now:

42 followers

Close to 1,900,000 page views ( I rounded up )

"Like Mother, Like Son Parts 1 - 10" has 4,278 page views

This is post 1843

There's 1599 published comments

And I'm averaging about 6,000 views a day it seems.

I have views from every country in the world with the top 10 in order being USA, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Australia, Norway, Mexico, France, Spain, and the Netherlands. Today I've had some from South Africa, Brazil, and Russia.

I had 92,036 page views last month!

The blog has only been up since March 15, 2014

Today is April 16, 2016

So, is that successful? Some have commented that this blog is successful. 

I honestly don't know! You see, I went from thousands of group members to only 42 followers but I get a lot more comments and I can track actual views of individual capped pics too.

Most get over 300 views. I have some under 100 views. I have many between 100 and 200 views.

I don't expect everyone to comment because there's a language barrier for some international readers and there's some out there that may not be comfortable following the blog in a way that can be tracked.

Most of my traffic comes from www.worldoftg.com so I don't know if it's just that I make good click bait or what.

People used to tell me it was the quality of the capped pics that made my groups successful. Others blame it on longevity. 

When I add links to the side those blogs tend to get a bump up in traffic too.

I've read articles about measuring the success of a blog and they quoted much more impressive numbers than mine. Like 1,000 followers and millions of page views. 

My take away on this is that I'm trying to learn from the numbers. I found if I spread out posts over time they get more views. People don't like to scroll down much it seems. The top capped pic is important because it shows up on my link on other sites.

I look at the check boxes on the posts to see feedback that's not a typed out comment. It helps affirm that people are looking at them.

I always appreciate comments and try my best to respond to them. Sometimes though I have to dig to find them if it's a new comment on an old post.

I'm not trying to toot my own horn here, but I hope this info helps put things into perspective for other TG Captioners out there that might get frustrated trying to figure this out themselves for their own blogs.

I don't know if this blog is a success but it's here. 

Sincerely,
Gensabi