How to measure the success of your blog?

How does one measure the success of his blog?

Depending on the motivation behind writing the blog, there could be two ways to measure it.

1) How many people visit your blog and read the content.

2) How much money your blog makes.

Depending on what is your motivation behind writing a blog, one of above two reasons would become a feel good factor. If your sole reason is just to communicate to people, your views on a topic then factors like how many people visit your blog, how many page views you get, how many of them go through your content seriously and how many comment on it become important. Going a step further if you create followers, that is an achievement. And based on these, if your blog starts getting listed on different blog lists, you become important. Perhaps if your interviews start appearing on different sites, you add a feather to your cap. And probably this journey comes to an end when your blog content is converted in to a book which is well read. Then you change from blog writer to a writer. Even though you continue with blog, your impression among people is changed now and no body would refer you by your blog but by your book. This is one way of measuring the success.

Another way is to keep a check on the money your blog is making. When one starts writing a blog irrespective of what is the intention behind, he surely comes across the concept of monetizing the blog. Earning some easy bucks with out taking any extra efforts, just out of your sheer interest of writing a blog. Why not? So, you enroll with Adsense. Hoping to see few dollars trickling down initially that probably would convert in to a big dollar fall ( aka water fall) as the blog grows. But then Adsense disappoints. But you are already on the path of making money and difficult to give up the idea. So, you explore more, try to add some more advertising stuff which may help you make money. It requires lot of trial and error. And then you generate a model that starts working for you. You start seeing those trickles. From there how your blog grows into successful one could be a story one can write about in his own blog.

These probably are the ways one can use measure the success of their blog. Recently my blog achieved one such mile stone which I had never expected and imagined. I realized that my blog has gained visitors from as good as 100 different countries. This has happened during IPL days and that on the day Gayle hit century. This century counts a lot for me. This is an achievement for me. Probably many of these visitors reached the blog by mistake never to revisit. But it means for me that my blog is appearing some where in people's search. I tried to go through the list of countries and I even do not many of these countries. 

This has given me a reason to continue with my blog. If the numbers are to be believed, there are around 196 countries on earth. It means I am half way through already and there are only 96 more country flags remaining to be collected. My blog has succeeded in reaching more than half of the world with lot more remaining to be achieved.That's the measure of success for my blog. What about yours?