The pressure to measure a blog’s success by external standards (such as links, Technorati ranking, PubSub ranking, traffic, comments, and list ranking) is high, and it is also incredibly natural. We humans tend to look for ways to compare ourselves to others, either to make us feel better by beating the other guy or to stop us from feeling bad because we’re not as bad as the other guy. This tendency is natural in blogging, too, but your business must fight it. Developing a blogging strategy that focuses on your metrics for success is important. If the only way you measure success is by traffic and other external measures, you could easily shut down your blog in spite of the importance of the relationships you build, the communication that happens, and the real value to your business that blogging brings.

Part of that set of metrics will almost certainly be external measures, and that’s fine, because it’s good to know your reach, your audience, how many pages people are seeing each visit, and other statistics. It’s all valuable marketing information. However, you also need to figure out ways to measure the value blogging is bringing to your business via other factors: How many customers did blogging let you help? How much buzz did the blog create? Did comments from customers bring more clarity to how a product should work (or why it doesn’t)? These are all important pieces of the successful blog puzzle. Simply measuring success by traffic is like measuring the success of a baseball team only by how many pitches get thrown: it’s good to know, but it doesn’t help you determine whether you should stay in the game.

Projecting Your Importance

The challenge for business blogs is that some readers will care about how “important” the business is and more specifically how important the blog is. This may happen not in obvious ways, but subversively. By defining your success publicly, defining how well you’re doing publicly, and projecting that you value blogging, you can project your importance and meet this challenge. Show that you value your readers and that you value blogging, perhaps by papering a wall in your office with postcards and e-mails sent by readers, and then regularly taking pictures of that wall and posting them on the blog. Or tell the world about things posted on your blog, and then point the world to your blog. Or sponsor contests. Ultimately, readers need to know that you value your blog not for the traffic it brings or for how visible it is externally, but for how it affects them the readers.

Pleasing Everyone

As you go forward in your blogging, you will encounter internal and external challenges. You will also encounter wildly different expectations from your readers, customers, and partners. Some will think you’ve lost it for starting a blog or for posting certain information to the blog, while others will think you’re great for doing the same things. We all know that there’s no way to please everyone, and this is the biggest reason for defining your own success instead of letting the blogosphere, analysts, or even your blog’s readers define it for you. As long as you have created and can continually refer back to your blogging strategy, you’ll know whether or not you’re succeeding. Just as you should be cautious when entering blogging, to make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons, so, too, should you be cautious as you’re blogging: don’t let anyone else define your success; otherwise, you’ll let them also define your failures.

PURITY VS. INCOME

Many of the paradigms and trends we’ve discussed in this article are about “old values” versus “new opportunities,” and the arguments of purity versus income are no different. Until 2004, seeing any kind of ads on blogs was an anomaly, and the blogger who allowed ads was generally regarded with some level of disdain. When Google launched its AdSense program, which let even the smallest blog publishers earn money from their websites, blogs started to include more advertising.

During the 2004 US presidential elections, advertising became prominent on many types of blogs, as both political parties and all kinds of action groups tried to saturate the blogosphere with opinion, “facts,” and diatribes. Since then, advertising on blogs has become fairly commonplace. Some blogs have understated ads that barely cover the costs of running the blogs, while other blogs are proudly for-profit endeavors. Some bloggers, such as Darren Rowse (www.problogger.net), even make a living purely by their blogging efforts, and entire networks of for-profit blogs such as Weblogs, Inc. (www.weblogsinc.com) and Gawker Media (www .gawker.com) have shown up. Even blog-specific ad networks, such as Blogads (www.blogads.com), AdBrite (www.adbrite.com), and Pheedo (www.pheedo.com), are increasing in number. Advertising has become an accepted practice on blogs, but that doesn’t mean everyone’s happy about it.

In 2005, a crisis occurred in blogging regarding the use of ads in blog feeds. While ads in blog feeds was probably a natural evolutionary step for blog-based advertising, it still riled many original bloggers to the point where Dave Winer, one of blogging’s founders, got sponsorship for a talk he made at a conference just to show how silly he believed ads in feeds were. Still, bloggers and blog publishers went ahead with the ad feed program. Readers didn’t end up clicking many ads, though, so many publishers eventually removed them entirely, but not before a certain cadre of bloggers got upset enough to kick up a minor fuss.

The argument for purity is largely that any attempt to advertise products on a blog will diminish the blogger’s ability to speak honestly after all, if you’re being paid by some company to talk about it, are you really likely to be objective and honest? Also, not all blogs talk about ads that appear on the site. Blog ads can be much like magazine ads a relevant company asks to post an ad and the publisher includes it for a fee. By giving the blogger final say-so over which ads are posted, though, the issue of being objective is moot. The ads become as authentic as the blog content. Of course, many people say they just ignore the blog ads anyway.

WORKING IT FOR YOUR BUSINESS

This collision of ideals will probably never be truly resolved: people who refuse to believe bloggers or businesses should make money are unlikely to change that stance, and people who believe that making money from something you spend a heck of a lot of time doing is natural are unlikely to concede. However, this trend is important to note for your business blog, because it could shape your customers’ expectations of how you deal with the public, how and why you blog, and what benefit you’re receiving. If the vast majority of readers begin wanting a more “pure” blog, they may tell you that your business shouldn’t receive a direct financial benefit from blogging either. Preparedness is key. Public opinion constantly changes, and being prepared and flexible will make your response that much more valuable and measured.