Blog Success: Subscription Numbers Count Over Visitors

Brian Clark of Copyblogger makes a good point about measuring the success of your blog. He says it's not number of visitors that counts, but number of subscribers. Here's an excerpt of his post:

Blog Commitment

Due to the principles of commitment and consistency, the most important blog metric to track is not raw traffic, page views, or unique monthly visitors. The most important thing to build and track is your subscriber base.

A subscriber has made a commitment to you that a mere site visitor hasn’t. Something magical happens when someone raises their hand and says “please communicate with me on a regular basis.” This small commitment is the heart of permission marketing, a very powerful concept that seems to be getting lost in all the Web 2.0 hoopla.

A subscription not only increases the frequency and regularity of contacts with a prospect, it also changes the frame through which that prospect will view your eventual offer. The prospect’s world view may now be such that a purchase is more likely thanks to the subscription relationship.

Thanks, Brian. Denise and I have always insisted on our blog clients inserting a subscription form from Feedblitz up at the top so readers can get regular updates through email.

If you're not using this free and easy service, you should. Here is a previous post, a Feedblitz tutorial from Denise.

And here's is a post about adding a hit counter to your blog. Measuring traffic is important, but more importantly, is getting the right kind of traffic: your targeted readers who will become clients.