There are alot of ways blogs can be evaluted for success, depending on your goals and objectives. Choose one or more and you’ll be on your way.

1. Traffic

Traffic, often tracked in a site statistics program, can include these measures:

  • Unique Visitors – This is individual IP addresses that visit.
  • Page Views – Total number of pages viewed (the higher the number of pages viewed per visitor, the stickier your site is).
  • Length of Stay – How long are those visitors staying? The more they stay, the more they’ll see.
  • Referrals – Shows you where your readers come from, including which search engines or other linked sites.


2. Number of RSS Subscribers

Feedburner and Bloglines make it easier to keep an eye on these numbers.

3. Reader Interaction

  • Feeback – Emails and Instant Messaging conversations are great for gauging the health of your blogs because you find out what people think and how they are use it.
  • Participation – See how many subscribe / unsubscribe to newsletters, respond to polls, communicate in the forums, and enter contests.

4. Comments

  • Number – This may be useful for engaging the level of interaction on your blog.
  • Quality – Did you create a conversation that stimulates your readers?

5. Incoming Links and Trackbacks

  • Links – Incoming links can indicate how well or how badly you’re writing. It can gauge inward traffic and can factor in climbing the rankings in search engines.
  • Trackbacks – They can notify you about what others are writing about you.
  • Search Engines – Typing in ‘link:domainname’ into Google and you’ll see the incoming links that that it has indexed for your blog.

6. Search Engine Rankings (SERPS)

How high your blog ranks in the major search engines (Google, Yahoo!) for different keywords is something you should monitor carefully.

7. ‘Top Blogs’ lists

  • Technorati has a ‘top 100‘ but and ranks all blogs in their index.
  • Blog Pulse has a top 40 blogs list also and different ranks for all blogs.
  • Feedster has a top 500 list.
  • Bloglines has a top blogs list.
  • Daypop has a top Weblogs page.

8. Awards

Would a coveted Bloggies award be important to you?

9. Social Bookmarking

There is a growing desire to get linked to and ranked well on social bookmarking pages like del.icio.us and digg.com, indicating success on a more micro level (i.e. per post) – although it’s definitely open to manipulation.

10. Income

If you want to earn money with your blog, the bottom line is an obvious marker of success.

Problogger, who inspired this post, has even more indicators here.