How to Measure Your Writing Success
Web writers mostly earn money for the amount of traffic their content attracts. Watching the page view tally for any given article is a good way to see which subject areas are attracting readers, and which ones aren't. Comments are another really great way to gauge the popularity of a given topic – or of the writer's particular spin on that topic. A good article will often attract high-quality comments, and will tend to see a certain amount of back and forth between commentators.
Tracking Your Social Media Shares
Besides the stats that appear on the writing site itself, another way to gauge the popularity of a topic is to look at things like social media shares. These sometimes show up on the article itself, in the form of a tally next to the appropriate social media button. Other times you might notice a number of shares or likes on the social media site itself. Whether it's a Retweet on Twitter, a Facebook like or share, a +1 on Google+, or a Pinterest Repin, you can usually see when other people either like/favourite or share your post with their friends.
When I Tweet or share a link on Facebook, I like to use a Google shortlink . This way I can fit a longer description and some tags into a Tweet. I can also track how often people click on the link itself (which is different from people sharing or liking the post.) I use the same short links in my posts, if I backlink to related content. This allows me to see whether people are engaging with my content in a different way – and one that I can't usually track when I publish on writing sites.
| Web-Traffic | Backlinks | ShortURL | Google | Tracking | Clickthrough | FOPP |
Image credit: Social media like by Gerd Altmann/Pixabay ( CC0 1.0 )
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Comments
cheri wrote on July 21, 2015, 10:48 PM
I do not usually share my articles on social media and I think its time to do it
CoralLevang wrote on July 22, 2015, 2:41 AM
I wonder...can readers comment on our posts here on PP? I don't think they can, but not sure.
MegL wrote on July 22, 2015, 2:42 AM
Traffic is vital, anything you can do to promote articles and posts is helpful but you're right, you need to KNOW what the statistics are and you have given us a number of ways of seeing which of our posts are most popular. That's useful information for writing more of the same.
I am not fond of short links though, because you can't tell where they are going. I know there are sites that will tell you where a short link leads to but that's a lot of trouble unless I really, really want more information.
AdGoggleKo wrote on July 22, 2015, 4:36 AM
I am lazy so I just tweet without shortening links. I only tried shortening links (on adf.ly) recently because I got curious how much money could I make by doing so. :)
bestwriter wrote on July 22, 2015, 6:55 AM
I am not relying on social networking sites. Most of my views are from here.
msiduri wrote on July 22, 2015, 8:28 AM
I use bit.ly for the same reason. And tweetdeck to schedule tweets. It doesn't make a whole lot of difference, but enough.
Ruby3881 wrote on July 23, 2015, 11:42 AM
It's important for both the writer and the writing site that content be shared. It's part of the process by which a site becomes known, and begins to get noticed by search engines.
AliCanary wrote on July 23, 2015, 3:53 PM
I notice that my blog posts, while garnering many more views than my typical posts here, receive hardly any comments, but I blame that on Google wanting people to create an account and sign before they can comment. Most people don't want to bother, which I understand, so I don't take it personally!
Feisty56 wrote on July 23, 2015, 11:03 PM
I'm afraid I'm not very business-like as far as follow-up after writing an article/post. I have long been sharing content to social media, not just my own but that of others that I think might be of interest to people.
ViperGirl85 wrote on July 29, 2015, 12:59 AM
I share most of my stuff on social media; from blogging sites such as this one; it just depends on the article. Most things may go on Twitter; sometimes on Facebook. I don't use hashtags anymore because spammers and bots won't stop following me.