Thursday, July 3, 2008

Blog off - blog on: Tips from a newbie

You know the drill: You get an idea, you set goals, you prepare for execution, you execute and you follow up on the goals.

This is basically how I got into the world of blogging. Except for that important part: Prepare.

I pretty much jumped right into the execution phase (sounds familiar?) by setting up a basic blog account and starting to write.

The charm of this was - simplicity.

However, at a certain point one reaches the phase of follow up and this is where you will eventually realize whether your goals and preparation were properly in place. You ask yourself: Is this project a success or not? The rest you can figure out.

I realized that I wasn't able to measure the term "success" because I didn't set up mechanisms for measuring Key Performance Indicators in my project.

Hey, isn't that the sound of business intelligence?

No coincidence really, because BI is a formalization of activities that successful organizations have always done: Set goals, measure critical success factors and follow up, analyze discrepancies and opportunities and make informed decisions.

Writing a blog is no different although it may not be as mission critical as running a business.

Those of you considering a blog on your own may want to consider these things in your preparation:
  1. You want to measure the number of readers of your blog. To do this you must install tracking scripts in your blog, e.g. from Google Analytics.
  2. Readers can subscribe to your blog and thus read it passively, i.e. they do not visit your blog site. To measure this activity you may want to use Feedburner to track number of subscribers etc.
  3. And not least: Read some of all the excellent blog literature out there
So this is my lesson learnt: Even blogs - however simple they may appear - require proper preparation.

Now I am back to the execution phase, where all the fun is. Writing blog articles!


/Nikolaj Henrichsen