Avinash Kaushik post on measuring blog success is a contribution in defining metrics where there really aren’t many, or any good measures.  In fact, Avinash has come up with more metrics to be evaluated by the WAA (Web Analytics Association) than anyone else I know.  

My own measures, which I mentioned over the last few months for blog success are broken up to three categories - but this list is Ad-Hoc and by no means complete.

Traffic/Readership

1. # of RSS Subscribers (is it growing - but how much? Use FeedBurner to measure Subscribers)
2. # of inbound links (which is more or less, the same thing as Technorati Rank - except Technorati Rank is based on links from blogs in Technorati, as I understand it)
3. # of Authorities in your subject/niche that refer to your blog posts
4. # of times people leave comments
5. amount of search engine traffic (in fact, you’ll want to segment the traffic coming from various sources)
6. Loyal readership - the number of repeat/return visitors - much more important for a blog because you want a lot of people to come back and read posts as they are published - so the more return visitors you have, the better.
7. Unique visitors - the more, the better.

Financial

1. AdSense - Blog Ads - if your a publisher - are you making money off the blog.

Thought Leadership

1. In the process of publishing a blog are you becoming established as a voice in the communities that read the blog?

That’s my ad-hoc defination of blog success - now lets see that Avinash Kaushik came up with.

Avinash looks at the stats for the blog in his first point - what has your blog contributed.  I like that however, Avinish does not post that often (maybe a couple of times a week at most) and he gets a lot of comments - good comments.  I post a lot more often and I get less comments.  I’d say his blog is more successful in that way because he posts less and gets more comments.  My point being - looking at stats forsblog from WordPress …and asking…is it good or not, works for him but it might not work for me because it would show that I have a lot more posts than comments.  So the metric here..does not take in account posting behavior or frequency, which it could.

Consumption of content -  if these are Avinash’s real numbers for Occam’s Razor - he’s doing well indeed.

If, via Feedburner, his average daily Feed Subscribers is 360 or above, I take my hat off to him, that’s very good for a blog that’s 6 months old.  I don’t understand subpoints 4, 5 and 6 so I’ll need to get Avinash to explain that to me when I see him at Emetrics Summit next month.   It sounds like you take all the subscribers for a month x 4 (but I’m not understanding why, even after reading Greg Linden’s blog post).

Engagement  = number of comments per post?   I think Avinash is saying that’s one way to look at it.  But that’s not going to work for someone like me that posts a lot, so I think the formula needs to be modified to also factor in frequency of posting.

Making a dent in the world

I think this is good.  In fact, if we were to merge this data  with the information I posted about a week or two ago we’d have everything we need to track blog influence over time.

What’s in for you? Well, Avinash’s blog has stayed in value since I first wrote him about this tool a couple of months back.  At that time kaushik.net/avinash/        is worth   $19,758.90   per year (maybe 3 months ago).    but that is based on commercial advertising and Avinash does not run any.

All of this does not actually end up defining any metrics - it’s an invite to define them - which is the whole point - there are no standard success metrics for blogs, and as web analysts, we need to start thinking of a standard way to measure blog success.