Measuring blog influence is still more of an art than a science.

Many marketers have difficulties in measuring the impact of blogs for different aspects of their businesses including, but not limited to branding, viral and word-of-mouth marketing, to customer loyalty and referrals.

Perhaps you are still confused to start a blog. You may have successfully convinced your team and boss about the benefits of blogging. Or, you have already been blogging for some time but simply don’t have an idea about how to find out the impact of the blogosphere on your business.

Whether you specially carry out a brand campaign or not, chances are by blogging, other bloggers will start talking about your business, product or service.

How do you monitor the conversation and brand?

How do you prove if a blog post or issue you have just posted is buzz-worthy?

First, it may be next to impossible to calculate precisely how a blog impact your product sales unless the product is specifically promoted through the blog, which is usually not the case.

It is also hard to measure word-of-mouth marketing, because the effect could come weeks, months, if not years later. Not to mention that some of the effects that happen offline.

Measuring Blog Influence

Fortunately, there are many metrics that are available for measurements. Because a blog is also a web site, it is possible to use the usual web metric tools to cultivate numbers.

Additionally, a blog also has its own set of metrics built upon the blogosphere and unique tools.

Some information that you can draw from a blog are based on these tools:

• Web Site Analytics. The standard web log analysis tool that comes with your web hosting could do it. Alternatively, Google Analytics provides a free but comprehensive service for web and blog owners. While the latter is the most comprehensive free web analytics I’ve seen, it is by no means easy or complete. Right now it has some limitations and also quite a steep learning curve.
• Blog to email subscription. At the very least, you can monitor the number of subscribers for a period of time. At least one blog to email service includes complete reports like open rate, forwards, bounce rates, unsubscribes, click-throughs, etc. With those numbers, you can measure how subscribers respond to different kinds of blog topics.
• Alexa ranking. This is more useful if you host your blog under a different domain than your website. Although Alexa ranking does have some drawbacks and relatively inaccurate, it is still useful to measure your blog performance and ranking across weeks or months — assuming that the distribution of visitors who use Alexa toolbar are the same at different times.
• Blog search. Two of the most popular blog services that allow you to monitor the blogosphere are Technorati and Bloglines. You can monitor different sets of words or domains and have the services deliver alerts to your email inbox or feed reader. This type of service is a time saver and a must-have tool because it is virtually impossible to read all the blogs to determine if there are chatters around your brand or product.

Regularity is The Key

When it comes to using above tools to figure out blog influence, it is necessary that you do it on a regular interval. I suggest weekly.

Although you can gather all the numbers and calculate progresses on a predetermined interval, make it a habit to check the blogosphere every day or even more frequently.

Blogging is about conversations and participation. If there are other bloggers who talk about your brand, you want to respond in a timely manner.

Blogging is also about setting aside some of your time to research the blogosphere and your target market to keep them engage with your blog. Having a blog on hiatus is sometimes worse than having none at all.

Proceed with Caution

Each web analytics software behaves differently. Find out how it works first before you proceed on getting the numbers for your metrics. Only through sound understanding of the tools that you can get meaningful metrics.

For instance, Technorati provides two numbers of links. The first is the links for the last six months, while the second is total links. You want the second number to accurately calculate the number of inbound links you have over a period of time.

All of these numbers by no means are the key performance indicators, but at least they give your some insights into how your blog contribute to your marketing and business as a whole.