When I say value, I don’t mean the traditional financial sense – I mean how do you value your blog? Looking around, you can work a number of scenarios, obviously traffic stats, etc give you an idea, but honestly, half of the stats are skewed by pings, feeds that may never be read, bots and more. Then you’ve got Google, search under some crazy terms, and see if you appear in the top 10,000 results (someone came to this blog last week searching for ‘bam creative blog‘ – now that’s weird!).

You can use Technorati, to see if anyone mentions you or your site, you can use the same to find inbound links, or you can wait for people to tell you they read your blog (hello to the four people who did this to me at Perth Massive a few weeks ago!).

Then, it seems many people use a less statistical method of evaluating their own blog health, which is the quantity and quality of the comments left after posts.

This is interesting, since starting this blog, I have learnt to appreciate comments, so much so that I find myself actually leaving comments on other blogs when I have something interesting (or even uninteresting) to say – I never used to do that, I always read a post, nodded and mumbled ‘I agree’, and move on, however now I know the buzz of getting people commenting on my posts, it makes me realise I should reciprocate on other folks blogs.

At the end of the day, what is the driver for you to maintain a blog? It takes time and effort, it sits out there in the ether, and what’s it all mean? A year ago, I believed most people with blogs posted self gratification and were full of self importance. I have started to realise that ordinary people, with little to say, can also use blogs as a way of ‘catching up’ with friends, colleagues, family and random strangers.

It’s nice when someone responds to a post, because then you realise someone is actually reading your drivel, and perhaps to at least one soul out there is interested in what you have to say.

What say you, fellow bloggers?

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