Building your online presence is an important part of branding yourself and for those who use influence to drive product sales or traffic, you know how important it is to get noticed. This is what blogs, social profiles, forums and other sharing media are for. So after following all the steps of getting noticed, how do you measure your success or know just how many people are actually noticing you?
The basic definition of influence is having an implicit or explicit effect of one thing on another. In online terms, this means your words causing someone to think or do something. The frustrating thing about building influence is that you can say the most profound things and share really excellent tips, but if you aren’t effectively promoting your thoughts, they simply go unnoticed.
Let’s break personal influence down into three parts: brand, expertise and trust. This is when you define who you are and what you stand for, display your knowledge and gain your audience’s trust. To earn trust online you must continuously present correct information, respond to visitor comments, provide breaking news or provide a solution to someone’s problem.
So now that we’ve defined what online influence is, let’s look at how to measure it.
Here are 7 ways to measure your influence, as share by Micah Baldwin from Mashable.
- Incoming Traffic – visitors, pageviews, search engine traffic, RSS subscribers, repeat visitors
Incoming Links – are people linking back to your site?
Reader Engagement – Comments, time spent on your site
Recommendations – Retweets, Stumbled, shared
Connections – How many “friends” do you have on social networks?
Track Record – number of blog posts, the age of your domain
Engagement – how long have you been active online?
You can find the stats to the above measures through analytics programs or by placing tracking pixels on your site. If you want to measure your influence via your blog, check out these tools/widgets: PostRank, Outbrain/WP-Post Ranking, Feedburner/TiwitterCounter and Zemanta.
