Introduction
One of the biggest problems I had early on with establishing our blog was determining what was meaningful and what was fluff in terms of a blog. What did it mean to have a good blog? Was there a way to measure the quality of blog? Were there various levels of goodness or was it all qualitative?

As a former engineer I like to measure things, in fact, I am almost obsessed with measurements. As a former project manager I like to set achievable goals and compare my performance against said objectives. Well, it turns out there are things you can measure and all blogs, or even websites, are created equal. In the spirit of transparency and helping out one another I am going to discuss what we have found to be valuable metrics as well as example goals that we are striving to meet for February 2009. Enjoy.

Metrics
Based on our experience and research we have found the following metrics to have value and have recognition within the online community:

1. Web traffic
2. Subscribers
3. Website Grade
4. Alexa Ranking
5. Content
6. Money

Each item is ranked in priority order – my opinion. I will address each in greater detail.

Web Traffic
We had discussed in a previous article that Traffic = Money; since I have heard this from multiple sources (both published and online) I believe it without a doubt. If Traffic = Money, then what would more important to measure? Monitor your traffic levels and constantly strive to increase traffic, especially in your early days of a blog. Steve Pavlina discusses this in much, much greater detail in his article “How To Make Money From Your Blog”.