3 Most Important Blog Success Factors

If you are thinking about starting a corporate blogging program (or if you are already doing a business blogging program), here are 3 things you should be paying attention to:

1. Can you get people to your company blogs?

Well, duh. Of course that's important. Without people showing up, how will you get anyone to take the next step?

There are a couple key things to pay attention to here:

• Search engine rankings (the higher the better typically)
• Number of unique visitors (and where are they coming from? Any basic analytics breakdown should show you).

2. Can you keep people on your business blogs?

You'll have a really good idea by looking at these two metrics:

• Average read time
• Average bounce rate

If your bounce rate is over 90%, that might be a bad thing. I say "might" because your blogging goal should be to move someone on to a next step. If your readers are so compelled by what you are talking about and want to move to your call-to-action within a few seconds, then great! The reality is that this is not going to happen. The best way to benchmark here is by looking at your corporate website stats.

3. Can you move visitors onto the next step?

It's great to have people reading your blog -- but unless you're a publisher, you don't make any money based on people spending 60 minutes reading about you and your company. That's why you want to move online blog visitors onto the next step.

The metrics that will tell you whether or not you succeed are simple:

• Clicks on the CTA
• Leads generated from the blogs!

So those are my top 3...what are yours?