Measuring Your Blog’s Success
Posted by Mike | Filed under Blogging, Social BookmarkingFirst of all, there is no absolute way to measure the success of your blog; it is a very subjective evaluation. However, in keeping up with the norm, here are the main methods to gauge and improve the short-term success of your blog.
1. Number of visitors
This is one of the most important measures of your blog’s success. One of the pleasures of blogging is being able to share your thoughts with the world and receiving appropriate feedbacks about your posts from the visitors. For bloggers who aim to make money, traffic is of utmost importance. Advertisers and opportunities will certainly come in flocks if you have the means to generate traffic your way. Basically I think a growth of 50% in traffic each month is a good indication of your blog’s progress.
2. Number of subscribers/followers
I have heard that having random traffic or untargeted one-time visitors are pretty useless if you cannot convert them into frequent or repeated visitors. Seriously, these frequent visitors will be the backbone readers of your blog and they are the ones who are more likely to participate in your blog’s activities. They also respond to your posts by leaving comments. It is pretty hard to track down all your frequent visitors, but the number of your feed subscribers should give you the general picture of how many people are actually tracking the progress and updates of your blogs.
Modern feed managers such as FeedBurner also provide records of your feed readers’ activities (or reach), so you can generally know if your readers are interested in what you are blogging about (plenty of clicks indicate that they are interested in a product or service that you blogged about).
The healthy growth of feed subscribers depends on many factors such as post frequency, the effort you put into the promotion of your blog, and whether you explicitly request your readers to subscribe. You should take note to make sure that the average number of your subscribers per week increases! If the number decreases or there is a sudden mass number of readers who unsubscribe, there must be something wrong with your posts, or your publishing frequency. In that case, check that you do not have offending and irrelevant materials in your blog. Also make sure that you have a consistent posting frequency. 
3. Comments to your posts
Basically if you are not using a service (e.g., StatCounter, Google Analytics) to track your visitors, you are losing out on some valuable information about the quality of your traffic! Normally, visitors that stay on your blog for a long time and are following many internal links one after another are considered the best traffic. The worst traffic is when visitors come to your blog and stay for no longer than 1 minute and then leave.
If you manage to attract many comments to your posts, you are either always writing about controversial issues or the readers really like your articles. If it is the latter, it means that your posts are well suited to your current visitors and usually they comment when they can relate to what you wrote. Therefore you might want to take note of that particular popular post and write more such posts having similar or related topics. If you have difficulty to obtain readers’ participation, you might want to ask them what type of content they prefer and you can also run a contest to encourage the people to comment!
4. Backlinks
Backlinks are a very important indication of your blog’s success. When other people link to your posts (without you purchasing, asking, or bribing), it means that your posts are certainly of high-quality. Why else in the world would the link to your posts if they don’t find them useful?
Initially, you may not have many backlinks, especially not to individual articles unless they are of supreme quality. You should also know that your blog’s web rankings depend very much on the amount of backlinks that you have… so much that many people who want immediate success are buying backlinks and reviews from other bloggers. As a new blogger, you can try to ask for backlinks politely or persuade other kind-hearted bloggers to link to you by linking to them first. They might be moved and link to you automatically, even if they don’t, at least you will get a few visits from them (trust me, they will know when you link to them :D).
5. Blog and post popularity in social networking and bookmarking sites
Social networking and bookmarking sites are very important source of traffic for your blog. Among the most popular are StumbleUpon, Digg and Delicious. Usually first time visitors to your blog will bookmark you if they find that your blog has good content, or a pretty design, so you should definitely optimize on these 2 aspects.
As for your blog posts, try to always write about something fresh, new, controversial, pretty or even ugly! Readers will always be attracted by extraordinary ideas and headlines, they don’t need mediocre content because those are everywhere on the internet. Dare to be different in your blog and posts, and you will surely be noticed (avoid being arrogant and disrespectful though).
Success on these social sites is mainly indicated by number of followers or friends that you have, number of readers who bookmarked your site and also how many positive votes or reviews that your blog posts received. To further promote your blog on these sites, you should analyze what type of articles are preferred by the social networking members and write more similar posts.
A little tip here, try to collect and build a list of useful materials such as list of freeware, beautiful websites, relevant articles — they are loved by social networking users!
This is not a complete list of how to gauge your blog performance but it will serve as a good guideline for you to take your blog forward. Good luck with your blogs, guys. 
Yay, first to comment! First, thanks for informing me about this. Now I have a basis to ‘measure’ my blog’s success. My blog is still very new, and it’s a free one (and it’s a wordpress.com blog so no ads allowed. bah.), so I’m obviously going to get revenue from it.
Anyway I’m just starting to I’m here to learn first, then follow your advices, then get my own domain after I learn the basics.
Renn: Thanks for the positive comment. As for you being a newbie, you might want to check some of my posts under the Blogging category. I truly believe that they can help you.
Good luck!
Measuring a blog’s success is easy, especially since most bloggers display most of their statistics publicly. Of course, there are the less open blogs, which are hard to measure its actual popularity, aside from its comment count and traffic.
Thank you very much for the article, I feel very good
Renn, why don’t you get a blogspot blog? I think it will be easier to be approved by AdSense and much more chance to monetize it than free wordpress platform, so much so that you might just be able to get your own dot com and hosting in a few months’ time, i’m half-way there in about 2 months hehe!
Very nice guide.
I only look at alexa rankings for blog success
I dunno Bobby, but maybe it’s because I like working with Wordpress and I don’t wanna risk going with other WP hosts (free WordPress MU hosts). So no choice but to stick with a wordpress.com blog for now. Until I get enough info from different blogs, I won’t start with my own domain yet.
Juggler I checked the posts there. Very helpful indeed! I especially liked the blogging tips you learned from school. It’s nice to see bloggers who spice up their posts with some personal stuff.
I take alexa(not always), serps and no. of comments as the main part of success.
Also not to forget, no. of subscribers is also a matter of concern.
Each point you have made is great. The most important aspect of SEO is backlinking. Backlinking = Traffic. All to often bloggers delete comments and run what little traffic they have off. To be a the best you need traffic.
Chetan, I thought Alexa was not that important? I thought it would not count as a gauge for a blog’s success as it can be easily manipulated. Anyone care to enlighten me?
@Renn Yeah, you should read Jug’s posts about blogging. They’re really helpful, I’ve read them already.
@Homebizseo Yea I agree. To be the best, you need traffic, but not just any kind of traffic. Quality traffic is a must.
Homebizseo.com: Nice equation you’ve got there. Backlinking = Traffic. Couldn’t agree more!
Chetan: Alexa can be a great “tool” to measure the success of a blog, but as Renn said, it can be manipulated easily so it wouldn’t be good to rely too much on Alexa.
Renn: I believe that Alexa isn’t that important, but it should still be considered as one factor to measure a blog’s success.
@juggler - If alexa can be manipulated then what about other things ?
comments, subscribers, backlinks everything can be bought.
Meethere: They can be bought, yes, but if you do that and you know within you that you just bought them, then you can’t really measure the success of your blog, can you?
If you really intend to make your blog successful, then you shouldn’t “buy” stuff or “manipulate” them.
And that what I was saying.
If the alexa ranking is naturally good, then it suggests the blog’s success. So alexa should be a point there IMHO.
Ah
Didn’t get it LOL. Okay. Thanks for your thoughts mate. 
Everything is spoofed in the internet.
Alexa, rss subscribers, backlinks.. anything can be bought!
So nothing can be sure to count success.
Woah, just to add on a little. Juggler, it does seem that The World Wide Web observer has grown a heck lot more compared to last year, with over a thousand new backlinks and tons more traffic (not to forget technorati and etc…). That should put this blog at the range of “elite”.
Well done.
Chetan: I can’t believe people actually buy subscribers. I mean, they’re writing for “nobody’s”! What’s wrong with some people these days?
Multippt: Hey, thanks for that man. I really appreciate it.
@Juggler - nothing wrong, they want to attract advertisers, everybody want s to be a chow or S-money.
@Renn:
congratulations on the new blog! if you want to have a more flexible blogging platform, you could try google’s blogger. you can monetize it with adsense for example.
@multippt
publishing stats could mean suicide if they aren’t very high.
even so, not every blog which doesn’t show off their stats have a low one.
maki of doshdosh doesn’t publish his rss subscribers until they reached 10K!
@meethere:
just my opinions. alexa ranking usually used by those who are very familiar with the computer or the internet, such as webmasters and developers. it makes alexa ranking not as reliable as RSS subscribers or google’s PR, IMHO.
So I usually use the combination of those three to appraise a blog.
@Chetan:
agree with that. anything incentived (do i spell it right?) could be considered bought, since people don’t do it purely on their own will.
not that i don’t agree with it, though…
@Renn:
though Alexa can be manipulated, some advertisers still look for them to determine a site’s traffic. And with alexa, the better you rank, the more accurate their algorithm. I dunno how this is going, but I read it somewhere. So I guess Alexa still counts.
@ meethere:
you cannot buy a good profile and reputation.