Build Your Blog to Attract New Business

• Number of views on specific posts and their geography and growth trend

• Comments received (i.e., number, quality and increase over time)

• Referral traffic to your business website from your blog and pattern of growth

• Time spent by visitors referred by the blog on your website (as a general rule, anyone spending more than two minutes on your website could be a potential customer)

• Ranking in search results for the brand and key domain keywords for the blog, consistency and addition of new keywords

• Building list of blog followers and level of influence in your industry or the media

• Mention in other industry blogs and publishers. To share an example, one of our posts, The 6 Marketing tactics for 2013 and Beyond, was recently picked up by ASEOHosting on their Best of December 2012 blog list

• Number of inbound links to the website by other blog forums, referral sites and social media websites, like the link to our post from Bizsugar

• Response levels to your blog posts on social media websites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, as seen through the increase in number of followers and frequency of responses

A blog is a critical marketing tool that helps position your brand and give it a voice. Your content strategy should include guidelines for social media interaction. While you are making major efforts to maintain an interesting and active blog, it is logical to also have it contribute to your company's growth. How do you plan your blog content strategy and which key indicators do you look at to gauge your blog's performance?