Web Business Marketing Blog

So you’re running a B2Blog and your visitor numbers increase. But what’s your measure for success? Having started up dozens of specialised sites, and looking at other sites publishing counters, geomaps or full statistics, I’d propose following benchmarks:

• Startup: tens of daily visitors
• After 3-6 months: 100+ daily visitors
• After 6-12 months: 1000+ daily visitors

And don’t benchmark against ‘major’ sites such as general media, Wikipedia, etc. These get millions of hits, but what really counts for you is their hits on your specialised topic.

After the first year / 1000 daily visitors, you’ve proven your stamina. To go further, it gets more difficult, but a number of factors work to your advantage:

• Age counts: Jakob Nielsen’s site serves a quarter million users per month, offering thought leadership articles since 1995
• Frequency matters, or does it? If your topic merits 10,000s daily visitors, consider increasing posting frequency. It promotes recurring visits. And every post is an opportunity to attract new readers.
• Quality matters: Your page views depends on your number of pages multiplied with average views per page. Average views can be used as a measure of quality, and quality should always predominate. Fortunately, quality tends to improve over time, though not automatically.
• Quantity matters: a few 1000 legacy pages viewed a couple of times per day provides good background traffic.