Blogs reflects perceptions, thoughts, and interests of individuals, and are almost similar to the websites. Successful maintenance of any blog lies in effective monitoring. Many PR agencies outsource blog-monitoring activities. However, many specialized tools are available to monitor a blog’s performance. Blogs are monitored to know the present status of the blog and helps to figure out where to improve.

Tools for monitoring your blog Monitoring blogs is an essential task for any individual blogger or business blogger.

• Page views: A page view is deemed as a measurement of how often a webpage is visited online. The number of page views can be gathered using any online stats program like gostats, awstats, etc.

• Unique visitors: The number of distinct people visiting your blog gives the actual number of its unique visitors. It is simple to measure, and gives you the details of how many people visited the blog page. It is like measuring a unit of traffic in terms of number of unique visitors to blog.

• Alexa rank: The alexa rank is calculated based on the number of visitors, and page views of each blog. It provides historical traffic data by showing trends to help in estimating whether a blog is gaining audience or losing its popularity. This can be found from alexa website.

• Inbound links: Inbound links are number of quality back links to the blog/site. Monitoring inbound links on major search engine is important, as the number of inbound links can demonstrate blogs credibility.

• Google Page Rank: Google page rank is a tool that rates websites on a scale of one to ten. It rates a site/a blog predominantly based on the number of quality back links. Based on the rank, you can get an idea of how search engines view your blog. New blogs need some time and quality content to get Google PR.

• Subscribers: Success of blog is also measured based on the number of subscribers (If you offer any subscriptions). It represents the number of readers, advertisers, or bloggers who choose your blog post on regular basis. With increase in subscribers for your blog, the scope of the blog increases.

• Technorati rank: Technorati is one of the largest blog search engine in the world. Technorati rank is based on the number of inbound links coming from other blogs. This helps in maintaining the blogs visibility and indicates the popularity of the blog.

The above information helps you in effective monitoring, and measuring the success of the blog. Do not measure a blog performance by considering only one parameter of the above. It is also suggested not to go overboard on any negative results, as it depends on many other quality and quantity parameters.