Have you set goals for your blog and are you measuring the progress you make each week or month? If you not you might want to think about why you’re blogging.

At the end of each month I review my blog traffic for the previous month in a bid to understand how visitors consume content. I have been sharing lessons via my blog along the way.

This ongoing evaluation has helped me to understand what content has a shelf life via search, the issues and topic that drives traffic from social networks and what has limited interest to the audience.

This insight may appear trivial from a blogging point of view but the same lessons applied to a large website or media property are powerful. It enables content to be planned to drive a specific audience response.

There are lots of different motivations for blogging. Business development, career development, education and networking are among the reasons that I blog.

Google Analytics enables me to set goals for my blog and track progress. It keeps me honest. If you haven’t set up analytics on your blog do it right now. It’s very easy to chase raw traffic but there is little value in racking up page views unless visitors hang around and read your content.

Likewise LinkedIn shares, retweets, likes and +1s may flatter your ego and demonstrating that your content is being shared but how far do they go to achieving you goals? A better indicator of success for me is if readers read and engage with a blog post, check out my biography and contact me.

These are the goals that I’ve set up in Google Analytics. I track visitors that visit two web blog posts or more, view a post for more than three minutes and visit either my biography or speaking page. In June 517 unique visitors met these goals for my blog, a little less than a fifth of the actual number of visitors.

That’s valuable insight.

If you haven’t already set up some goals for your blog thing about doing so and then tracking them monthly.