As I’ve been increasing my posting frequency I’ve also been trying to work out the metrics to follow to judge if my site is being successful. By a strict visitors game, I have been increasing traffic continually, more people have been coming to my site.

Even better is that my bounce rate hasn’t increased from what it was and my pages viewed have increased (slightly). The one thing that hasn’t improved on the site is the RSS subscribers.

To me that means the site isn’t interesting enough to get the regular updates. So I’m trying to figure out what exactly the content needs to become interesting enough to increase subscribers.

For me a successful site is an ever growing audience that wants to read and keep coming back. RSS is the best metric I can think of to track that.

Sites that I subscribe to fall in two categories.

1. Referred by friends
2. Sites I’ve found useful content on a few times

So for me the goal is to target those items. Try to encourage current readers to pass links around and keep writing useful content so that I lee coming across people’s paths