How can you really tell if the quality of your blog posts are improving over time? This is after all, a key objective of blogging.
In reality, it depends on what youre hoping to accomplish.
If youre blogging to:
- generate affiliate and content network revenues, the answer is obvious.
- to drive the bottom line ultimately by positioning yourself as an authority in your industry, youll need to routinely publish Resource type posts (see Types of Social Media Content). Unfortunately, its not as easy to track the quality of a Resource post as it is to track the quality of an Entertainment/Sensationalized post.
Perhaps the single best metric for tracking Resource post quality is the number of Delicious saves. Something saved a few hundred times is obviously more of a resource than something with no saves. Its not perfect since not everyone uses Delicious, but it is a great relative measure, and the single best metric to track progress over time.
Unfortunately, while Delicious is a great social bookmarking tool, its interface does not make it easy to extract the information necessary to help track the quality of posts over time (if you're reading this and you work for Delicious ... hint hint).
What is DeliciousCount?
DeliciousCount is a great tool to help assess blog post quality. The plugin displays the number of Delicious saves of each post in a blog in a user friendly 'summarized' format.
Where to Download it?
Download the DeliciousCount WordPress Plugin.
How to Use DeliciousCount WordPress Plugin?
Once installed, you'll notice the link to the results page labeled as "DeliciousCount" in your main WordPress Menu. Merely click on that link to be taken to the first results page. To make it more friendly, the results are sortable by:
-
a. date (all-time or choose a date range)
b. post title (alphabetical)
c. count (# of delicious saves)
DeliciousCount Benefits:
At the current time, we've found 3 benefits in particular to using the DeliciousCount WordPress plugin:
- monitor your posts over time to continually improve post quality
- sort by "count" to see which posts have historically performed best, then learn what aspects of those posts made them "quality posts"
- use the Plugin as a performance management system for bloggers and writers
Bookmark this page and check back frequently to ensure that you've always got the latest and greatest version of DeliciousCount.
Enjoy!