But, from there it grew. Because in addition to these, skill and content targeted to audience are essential, as we explored in part two. But wait, there’s more. Here are our final two attributes you need if you’re going to blog. At least for now.

 

7. Patience. You aren’t going to experience a groundswell of traffic to your site overnight. You probably won’t experience much traffic for the first number of months. Patience is a prerequisite. This ties into the discipline mentioned earlier. Know that this requires a big picture, long term perspective. We all want thousands of unique visitors each day. But remember one qualified inbound lead as a direct result of your blog has greater value than one thousand passive readers.

 

On readership, promoting the blog is an entirely different story. A story for another time.

 

8. Metrics. All good marketing is about metrics and blogs are no exception. One of the single greatest assets of web marketing is measurement. Google Analytics, which is free, will give you great data on traffic to your blog, most popular pages, time on site, referring sites and more. Use this information to understand the types of topics of most value and interest to your readers. When quantifying the value of your blog, refer back to your strategic objectives and make sure your goals are in alignment with your initiatives. And the most important metric of all: are you getting qualifed leads?