Your Measure Of Reader Satisfaction
02. Oct, 2007 
13 Comments - Leave your comment
When have you started blogging? Yesterday? One year ago? Longer than you remember? It doesn’t matter. Everybody knows you are concerned with your readers’ satisfaction. Your blog is a mirror of your concern:
- You balance paid reviews with useful posts, trying to bring more vitality to your writing;
- You answer your readers’ questions the best way you can;
- You write compelling “Thank You” letters to your readers, sharing your results made possible through them;
- Taking example from the bees, you cross-polinate social media viral seeds;
- You celebrate your blog’s anniversary by giving away awesome graphic design awards, or you launch great birthday bash competitions with $54000 worth of prizes;
- You get out of your comfort zone and take risks to offer your readers an enhanced experience;
- You think like a gardner: “don’t ignore it, or it will die”, be it a post, a comment, or a contact.
- Sometimes, from too much reader love, you make your fellow bloggers hate you.
At the end of the day, here you sit, tired yet happy, still under the effect of the adrenaline rush that gave you the strength to do all those beautiful things for your readers’ satisfaction. But how do you know when you get there? How do you measure the satisfaction of so many (or so few?) people, out of whom, maybe 0.5% leave a comment on your blog?
You gather lots of figures: feedcount, bounce rate, pages per visit, visitor loyalty, or visitor recency. Which of them gives you the measure of your success?
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If I understand you currently, I can’t [measure it completely and 100% for everyone], and that’s the beauty of my life. It makes me keep wondering and doing things. Of course, it’s also unhealthy. I will blog more about it in a leeeeengthy post if you don’t mind. Otherwise, I’ll post a long comment here later tonight.
Very, very good question!
Thanks for including me in your post!
“But how do you know when you get there?” For me, I don’t think I will ever “get there”. Trying to keep my reader’s attention and getting new readers and making them happy is what drives me to write through blocks and keep being active “socially” when I feel anything but social. I think if I honestly look at what I’ve done that day, I know whether I’ve done my best to contribute to my reader’s satisfaction…I can’t do much more than that because readers are people and people are innately impossible to please 100% of the time
Hi Dana, welcome here and thank you for your answer. Isn’t it strange, this human nature? While no human cannot be pleased 100% of the time, there are some humans who are born unpleased 100% of their time. I think that you are doing a good job, and you are writing with your readers in mind.
Bes, I’m looking forward for your post and your looonger comment
Bes,
My philosophy is, if you have a comment over three paragraphs long, a post might be a good substitute.
Simonne,
Once again, you have shown excellency in finding reader appreciation initiatives across the web.
Thanks for the link about answering readers’ questions on my blog.
You pose an interesting question here. Keeping track of stats and interacting with readers gives you some information, but as Dana says you can never completely know.
I think that’s why it’s important, that as well as keeping readers in mind, that you blog for yourself as well.
Thanks for the mention, Simonne.
Holding a giveaway is a great idea, although you need to be sure you stay on Google’s good side. I made a big mistake with mine, which I’ll be writing about soon.
Still, it was a joy to give away so many great prizes.
You are welcome, Yvonne, I thank you for your input. This is a question I’ve asked myself many times, because I don’t see any statistics being relevant in this respect. Quantitatively, we can have a rough idea, but qualitatively, it’s very difficult to know how our readers feel about our outcome. I blog for myself, because I like to write, but I also discovered that I enjoy the interaction and the exchange of ideas made possible by blogging.
Ronald, I’m glad you liked the sources I mentioned. This is why I like blogging at Reader Appreciation Project: with every new post I write, I discover new people and new blogs worth reading every day.
Hi David. I’ve just read this morning about your story. I hope you’ll recover soon. Besides the joy of the giveaways, you can be proud that the guys from Google are reading your blog – it seems quite tough to have them as “loyal” readers, isn’t it? Thank you for stopping by.
Haha, I think they arrived at my blog following some forum publicity on my prize giveaway. Either that, or I was manually reported for ‘paid links’.
My pleasure stopping by.
Reader satisfaction is obviously important for long-term success. I track my subscriber numbers more than anything else.
Your subscribers number definitely shows you care, Steven. And so is the overall look of your blog. Thank you.
Thanks for the helpful article!