There are many ways to measure the success of your blog depending on what you have as goals for blogging. You may be interested in driving traffic to your blog, raising awareness of your business, building a list of followers/subscribers, or establishing yourself or your business as an authority on a subject. There are many good reasons to blog, but how do you measure if you are reaching your goals?
       
Here are some blog measurement ideas to help give you insights into how well your blog is doing or even to help you decide what goals to aim for when blogging.

• Raw Author Contribution can answer the question "Do you deserve to be successful?" and is measured by an author's number of posts per month and number of words per post
• Onsite audience growth can be measured using tools such as Google Analytics to measure the visitors and unique visitors to your blog site
• Offsite audience growth can be measured if you syndicate your blog via an RSS feed. A feed allows people to subscribe to your blog without visiting the blog's website. You can use a syndication tool such as FeedBurnder to create a feed of your blog and you can use FeedBurner's analytics tools to measure your subscribers
• If you are trying to create a conversation on your blog you might consider visitor comments as a goal. You can measure the conversion rate as the number of comments per post
• What is the cost of your blog? If you are writing it yourself you could measure the number hours it takes to write your blog entries and multiply that by an hourly rate of what your time is worth. You might also factor in the costs of technology such as hosting or internet connection and also the opportunity cost; what else could you be doing with the time you spend blogging?

Of course there is the Return On Investment of your blog.

      
To calculate your blog's ROI, start by adding up not only the bloggers' salary, but also any design, hosting and maintenance costs.

You also need to calculate what revenue-oriented benefits your blog generates. Below is a list of ways to find customers, keep customers, reduce costs and ultimately maximize your blog's ROI.

• A blog can make your business more personal
• You can get valuable feedback from your blog in the form of comments
• A blog can be an alternative to a news release
• A blog can help your organization build internal and external relationships
• A blog may be the best way for your business to communicate timely and accurate information during a crisis and manage expectations and reputation
• Use storytelling to build your brand
• Build third person credibility through your networks
• Use your blog to educate and train your customers and staff
• Greater organizational transparency is rapidly becoming a requirement for organizations and a blog can be a way to engage openly and honestly with staff and customers

It is essential that you understand what you are measuring and keep in mind the goals of either achieving some sort of conversion or building brand awareness.

Sources:
http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/blog-metrics-six-recommendations-for-measuring-your-success/
http://www.socialsignal.com/blog/rob-cottingham/10-ways-blogging-builds-value-for-your-organization
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-roi/calculate-your-blogging-roi-in-9-steps/
http://mashable.com/2011/07/04/how-to-measure-roi-content-marketing-strategy/
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/returnoninvestment.asp