Whenever anyone talks about the success of a blog, it’s usually measured in traffic. How many unique views do you have on your blog? What are your hits? How much traffic do you get from search engines? My take is that traffic is not the only measure of blog ’success.’

Here is why I’ve come to think this way. Our primary blog, Blogaholics, does well with traffic and also has a pretty high subscription rate. However, this blog does poorly on traffic but has a fair number more subscribers. So, I could get worried about why I don’t have outstanding incomming traffic to the site. But I’m not. Search engines are not everything. We are well rated on the search engines, but the topics we cover, often about blogging (what’s known as metablogging), are covered by so many others that we just don’t achieve the click through’s one might expect (yet). Our archives are not large enough to put us higher in the listings. But the blog is doing great - we’re talked about and we’re read. And I’m quite satisfied.

I think that traffic is an overrated mode of rating. Let’s look at how popular you are with readers in general - do they like you enough to stick around for more?

So, my advice: don’t fret if you don’t get high traffic on your site. If you have high RSS traffic, and a ton of subscribers, consider your blog on its way to success.