I’ve been wondering this recently. What makes a blog successful? Do you count the number of subscribers and measure that against other blog giants in the industry? Do you count the amount of money your blog makes? To answer this question, we first need to determine your blog’s purpose.

Why do you blog? Take a minute to think about it. I’ll wait.

Many may blog to vent, provide information, sell a product, advertise an idea, or simply to expound on hot topics in their particular niche. Now tell me – what does a succesful blog look like? Does it have high subscriber numbers? Does it have a sleek appearance? Does it nail down content on a regular basis? (What?)

 A blog’s success depends on our own definition of our blog. One blogger may be comfortable with a blog’s few readers, while the next blogger wants a thousand and one people to open their RSS feed daily. The difference is in perspective.

Do you look at your blog as a business?
If you do, for a moment consider it a brick and mortar store. The more customers that walk through the door, then the more potential sales you’ll make. Stores do things for a rhyme and a reason too. Don’t think the 80’s music softly pedaling you through the store aisles isn’t by design. It is. Grocery stores have an entire science behind placement of products on shelves, location, and all. They want you to find this, so you then realize you need something else across the store.

The same principles apply to a good blog. A person may come in looking for SEO tips, and realize they’ve found a goldmine and explore further into the store. The repeat customer is the RSS subscriber, so the RSS feed count does make a difference, when considering the success of a blog as a business. It doesn’t mean as much as constant traffic, but you need folks coming through the doors, right?

A blog as a personal outlet
This type of blog derives success from far different metrics. The personal outlet blog frees a person up to spout political rants, to editorialize on current events, to gossip, mudsling, parlay, and otherwise vent in a secure place. These blogs do become vastly popular. They sometimes even morph into blogs as a business. Once the traffic comes into the site, their ad space revenue starts to add up. These blogs take a liking to it, and often times the blogger will kick down cubicle walls to be at home. They have a pioneer spirit.  As soon as that happens, they rely on the business aspect, and the walls of a personal blog’s success crumble away as well.

In the beginning though, a personal blog’s metrics lies with the quality of writing. Like me, many of you have probably experienced the exuberance over RSS numbers, but the real challenge, and the real joy comes from the writing and the process. Blogging becomes a lifestyle. It’s success everyday when we interact, engage, and entertain strangers through an online medium. We are writers, poets, pranksters, and socialites. That’s the success of the personal blog. It’s a unifier and a societal lens.

So to gauge your blog’s success you should first consider your blog’s purpose. If you want to make money, then success may have to wait for dollars and readers to sign up. A personal blog finds success when it reaches a true voice, when the author finds themselves laying in bed with an idea too good to lose to sleep. They stretch, find a pad or laptop and jot it down for its birth on the web the next day.

1. Learn a valuable skill. In a world where Microsoft Word automatically capitalizes our lowercase i and changes glaring typos with a right click, quality writing skills have become a rarity. Use your newfound writing skills to market yourself to employers, show off exemplary articles on a blog, or just polish your Myspace profile. In the end, readers will appreciate your efforts. Also, money will rain down on you. Trust me.
2. Invalidate grammar Nazis. It’s not a quiet secret that those with writing prowess also tend to know their way around grammar rules. With grammar skills you can call out the grammar Nazis in the comment sections of your favorite blogs. You can uncloak them, revealing them to be the vulnerable, insecure critic you knew them to be.
3. Have advertisers pay you for a review. Do you own a blog? By writing well, you can earn serious loot by writing about services. We’re not talking about adult content, either. This is strictly on the up-and-up (whatever that means).
4. Guest post on a popular blog. A-List Bloggers have one thing in common — giant RSS subscription numbers. If you write well, you may receive an email requesting you write a post for them. Even the big guys network, right? Hey, it could happen!
5. Write scathing responses to popular posts. It should be no secret that certain blogs have their finger on the pulse of the media. Well, take your own finger and stop the blood from pumping. Push hard enough with the right content and you might see a traffic spike higher than what the “Leave Britney Alone” video produced.
6. Twitter with the best of them. You can’t spell Twitter without “wit”. Write witty tweets and you’re sure to gain followers, and eventually you’ll rule the blogosphere (twittosphere?).
7. Drive traffic to your site through SEO writing. Earn money from your superior use of words. Create pages of content to wow the search engines. Learn SEO tricks and become number one in Google SERP’s for phrases like “candy butter driveshaft”.
8. Write impressive recommendations and reviews. Most bloggers love to read reviews of their site. But if the review reads, “He’s got the l33t blog. I love the contents” it loses its appeal. Shine up your reviews until they glow. (As a rule, content refers to all posts in a blog — there is no need for an S on the end.)
9. Comment with authority. A well spoken comment will gain the respect of blog owners and other readers. Do it consistently on popular blogs and watch your RSS subscription numbers climb.
10. Write impressive top ten lists. A top ten list with misspellings just doesn’t bode well for your Late Night blogging style success. Learn to write well, not good, and Diggers, Sphinners, and other social media junkies will love you.

I don’t even need to finish that sentence. Many of you completed the phrase in your mind, maybe without even thinking about it. With language, we become hypnotized by phrases. We can finish the sentence just like we’re having a conversation with a lover in the park. “Good things come to those…” See what I mean? As bloggers, can’t we use this testament to the human mind to our advantage?We can try to create a viral message that catches on like the holy ghost at a rapture party, but that just won’t happen for 99% of us. I’ll give an example of what we can do.

A friend of mine in college used to wear this tshirt every once in a while. The tshirt had a common phrase on the front, from which a lot more was implied. It drew giggles, slaps on the back, faux praise, and most of all — laughs. The shirt read:

I am the man from Nantucket

Now this was genius marketing on his part. Every girl that read his shirt was being sold a fantasy, and every guy was given a wry smile. He was selling himself, and not short (sorry, had to go there). What we can do with a title, a blog post, and our whole blog’s meme can be seen through this type of message. Turn a commonality into a uniqueness. Turn a cliche on its head. Create a unique character in the reader’s mind.

Fiction writers learn early on that cliches only work for specific characters or to expose a point. What bloggers have to realize — no matter how true to life posts may be — you are still creating a character on the page. But I’m just blogging about my dinner, you say? That’s creating a character in our mind, especially if the dinner was expensive, the restaurant chic, and the photos nearly edible. What better way to create a character full of success than showing him indulging and imbibing? And if our blog carries the personal weight of our life’s journey, then the cliches probably belong alongside our workout routine.

Whether our blogs separate wholly from our natural life or recant daily activities like its their job, they do manifest in the minds of our readers a person with certain qualities. Some of my favorite blogs have all sorts of characters writing them. They range from meek and gentle to outspoken and overly confident. I read each one of them for different reasons. What type of character does your blog have? Have you created a Hemingwaybull fighter or a Carver introvert?

Our blog’s maturity - our character development - should be more than just throwing gunk at the wall then seeing what sticks. My friend knew his shirt’s slogan would raise eyebrows, bringing him attention of a far different kind than he usually received. Why not have a little fun, he would say. You only live once.

There’s someone watching. We all have traffic measurement software. We can see the peaks and valleys and equate those to numbers, but behind those soft falling crests and mesmerizing integers come human beings. (Unless of course your traffic analysis software mistakenly counts bots, but I digress.) Those humans are trained readers, and everyone of them carries their own grenades to the blog post you’re writing at this moment.

These grenades can best be described as the reader’s indifference weapons. The moment our writing veers from their scope of interest the pin might be pulled, leaving their hand flinching with anticipation. They want to toss it into your corner and go scurrying for their safe zones — those blogs they frequent. You must answer why they should stay.

We all have an audience. We want the traffic, and we want the recognition for our hard work. We think our egos are bulletproof, protected from those grenade blasts, but they are not. We need a comment — a bone, thrown.

What goals do our readers have? Can we find that out? Are they seeking to create their own webpages, learn more about pottery, fix a tire, write a letter to the great beyond? How did they find us? What role does our blog fill?

Know Thyself

We each have our experience, education, language, problems, family, and work.  Our blogs may deal with those things or completely ignore them. The visitors to our blogs have their whole package of influences. And they have their grenades poised to erase you from their environment. If we know ourselves, though, we can draw in those who can relate to our blog posts. They may come sheepishly at first, so we need to reinforce their initial impression through quality, focused writing. Those who toss their grenades and vanquish our blog from their landscape may find somewhere else they can relate. That’s fine. What should and does matter are the readers who stay, those who sign up for the RSS feeds, comment on the posts, and praise the good work of our writing.

Our writing can be expressive, tunneled outpourings that drench our readers. Or, it can be simple, instructive and concise on the topics we are passionate.  

Through blogging, we all have audiences. So look up from your keyboard, survey those reading, and, most importantly, know yourself.