Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to:

DavePress in 2009

There have been about 60,000 visits to this blog in the last twelve months, and thanks to you all.

In December the site broke through the 1,000 subscribers barrier, which is very nice indeed. 50-odd of those subscribers choose to get updates from the site via email.

Big thanks to those that have contributed guest blog posts this year too. Hopefully there will be more in 2010 – if you fancy having a go, just drop me a line.

The most popular day was a Saturday, strangely enough, the 17th October. It looks like this was due to the myth of engaging with everyone post being stumbled.

Here’s a list of the top 10 posts on DavePress this year, with the number of views for each:

I suspect the reason for some of these posts’ success comes down to search engine traffic.

How do you measure blog success?

What sort of things do you look at to measure the ‘success’ of your blog, whether as a whole site or on a post by post process. I guess it might depend on why you are blogging as to what your actual definition of success might be.

Here’s a few basic ways that I thought of:

  • Page views
  • Number of comments
  • Saves to del.icio.us etc and other social bookmarking sites like Digg etc
  • Links to you from other blog
  • Number of RSS subscribers

I suppose even these measures aren’t definite. For example, a few comments having a quality discussion are probably more valuable than hundreds saying ‘Great post!’ or something equally rubbish.

But of course there are other things to, which might tie in more to your reason for blogging. For example, campaign blogs which have a particular cause in mind, or blog that promote a new way of doing things. You might not get many comments, but if you manage to change the way people are doing things, then you have been successful. I guess the only problem is that you won’t know about it!

The great thing about blogging, though, is that if what you are doing is useful to people, or if it is something that folk find interesting, then people will link to you, or comment, or bookmark your stuff. It’s almost inevitable.

How do you measure your blog’s success?