For many bloggers, driving traffic is one of their main goals of having a blog in the first place. Many of us measure success based on the number of views per day, or the number of comments, or retweets that happened because of something you posted.

The reason that blogging is like fishing is because you have to continually be adapting your strategy to “catch the most fish”. Where the flyfisher picks his fly with care, depending on the conditions of the day, the stream or river he is fishing, and the type of fish he is trying to catch, the blogger must similarily choose his/her headlines and content with care as well.

The headlines, or subject of a blog post is your “bait”. You have to put it together properly to attract the most attention and get people to actually click into your site, which is essentially a “bite”.

Now that you have them on the hook, you need to ensure the content at your blog is valuable and unique, so that the reader will spend some time looking around, subscribe to you, and become a loyal follower. If they end up just visiting and then leaving you have lost the catch for that opportunity. A “catch” to me would be a subscriber, comment, or article retweet, something that engages the visitor further. If you have accomplished that then you have just caught one fish.

Often times the number of fish caught is not as important as the size of the fish. In blogging, this equates to the quality of your followers. For example, 15 followers/subscribers who never interact may not be nearly as important as catching the 1 big fish, the person who has the connections, information, and williness to connect with you and make a difference.

If you are not getting the traffic and interactions that you want on your blog then adjust your bait. Continue to research and come up with different ideas, better headlines, different channels. Using analytics such as Google Analytics will help you determine where you are failing.

If you are simply not getting any traffic, then you need to improve your headlines, and get them out through channels like Twitter, Facebook, and many other social networks.

If you are getting a lot of views, but only for a very short duration of time, and not many repeat visitors then you probably need to improve the quality, content, and uniqueness of your site.

The more you fish, and learn about fishing, the more likely you will catch more fish, and bigger fish, on any given day. If you are still reading this I ask that you please comment, retweet, or subscribe to know that I have set my lure properly with this article. Positive and negative feedback is welcome.

One of the most difficult questions to answer for many business and entreprenuers who are engaging in social media is, “in what ways, and how much is this affecting my business”. You need to be able to measure ROI at the end of the day, and it is a more difficult challenge in the new world of social media than it has traditionally has been.

A key point is to have a focus on what you are trying to accomplish when you first engage in social media. Don’t just jump in without a plan. Come up with something specific and measurable as an end goal, and make every decision around what you do, what you share, where you share it, etc, based on that.

Once you have established your end goals, take a benchmark of where are currently on those same measurements so you will know where you started. One you have these two points of data, where you started, and where you want to get, then you can begin to measure progress.

ROI may not be in terms of dollars, it may be in terms of followers, reduced call volumes, increased customer satisfaction, or any number of other measures. Dell has used Twitter as a channel for offering “Twitter only promotions” so they can measure exactly how much business they are doing specifically through that channel. What other creative ways can you come up with for using social media for your business that will be highly measureable in terms of ROI?