2. Bonus #1: Internal metrics
Internal metrics are the ones that determine how well your blog is doing on its own.
Paying a bonus based on these metrics incentivizes your blogger to build a better blog, not just chase word counts.
Internal blog metrics to measure:
- number of new comments
- number of new feed or email subscribers
- sales directly generated by the blog
You can use the following numbers as a starting guide for offering a bonus:
- Comments bonus: $1 per new comment is a good rate. Obviously that shouldn't include the blogger's own comments. If you have a WordPress blog, you can use the GeneralStats plugin to quickly count comments.
- Subscribers bonus: Subscribers are more important than commenters. Subscribers are giving you permission to push your marketing message to their feed reader or email inbox. $2-3 per new subscriber is a good starting rate.
- RSS Feed tool: FeedBurner is the best service for tracking the number of RSS feed subscribers you have.
- Email newsletter services: AWeber and ConstantContact are two of the best email newsletter services available.
- Sales commission: A commission for any sales directly generated by the blog is probably the best way to incentivize a business blogger. And it directly aligns with your business goals. If you already have an affiliate program, make your blogger an affiliate so they can earn sales commissions.
3. Bonus #2: External metrics
These external metrics measure the success of your blog compared to the rest of the Web. By offering performance bonsues based on these metrics, you're encouraging your Web team to market your blog to niche neighbors and the Web at large.
What to measure:
- page views, unique views
- search referrals
- inbound links
Content publishers like About.com make money by selling advertising based on the number of page views the site gets. So as an About.com guide, I get paid based on page views.
For a small business that does not depend on page views, it makes more sense to pay based on unique views or unique visitors. You care more about the number of unique people your blog/website is reaching. Use a Web analytics service like Google Analytics (free but very powerful) to measure the unique visits to your site. A bonus of $0.25 - $0.50 per unique visit is reasonable -- it's less than the comments bonus, but not so low it doesn't matter. You can either set it to the absolute unique visits count, or based on an increase from the previous month.
Search referrals are a great way to measure the success of your blog. However, because it might take a few months for actions to turn into search engine referrals, it's not a good metric to use to pay for blogger performance.
Instead of directly paying for search referrals, paying based on the number of new inbound links is a good proxy. Generally, more inbound links will turn into more search referrals. Technorati is a good tool for measuring the inbound links to your blog. What makes Technorati unique is that it only measures inbound links from the last 90 days. This forces your blogger to continually build inbound links and not just stop after a good month. I like paying $0.25 to $1 for each month-to-month increase in inbound links.
There's a ton of info in this article, and I realize it can be very confusing for a small business owner trying to create a reasonable compensation model for their bloggers. Email me at onlinebusiness.guide@about.com if you have any questions about this topic or anything else related to your online business.