How do you define a successful blog?

Hi Mensab, I agree that income is not a good measurement of successful blog. Many bloggers are so passionate about blogging, and they make 6 digit income from blogging after years of hard work.
I read a blog post by shoemoney just now, he quoted John Chow as saying that he will blog at an average of 2.8 posts per day, regardless of readers or no reader, money or no money.

Mensab, how much time do you spend maintaining your three blogs?

I agree to the 2 responces ablve that blogging can be a fun way to get our thoughts out there. i do't do it for the mney. I do it for the way I can influence someone whe looking for a piece of technology or what not.

Gosh! Is this really achievable? I might never see the sun shining in the morning if I want to have a successful blog.

haha starscream, that is a very well-defined and lofty goal.
I think traffic with 10,000 visitors will generate closer to 30,000 page views. It is quite likely that some readers will click on a few blog posts and read it. I have some days when the visitors are less than 20, and page views are closer to 50.
The more than 500 backlinks are too low, and very easy to achieve. You just have to join Blogcarnival, and add comments to as many blogs and websites you can find, and you can get the 500 backlinks within a week.

OK, can someone explain again the function and purpose of backlinks? How are they important to a blog?

I dont' know what a back link is but frankly I do't really care how many visits I get on my blog. i have a blog up on klango and it gets commented every oonce in a while but that's fine. i don't do it for the money as tht will make me lose interet in what I really blog about.

@eiley, it's subjective. You can be successful with 50 blog readers as well. For me i have 10,000 page views programmers blog. So i need more to have some revenue on site.

@scheng1, yeah carnival can make 500 back-links but i prefer high PR links from tom's backlink builder program.

@backlink-query: it is used by google for ranking and search result display. you can find dofollow blogs and forums to get better quality linking to your site. hope this helps.

Ok starscream, I get what you mean now. 500 backlinks from high PR websites, especially PR6 and above are remarkable.
It's extremely hard to find a website and web-page with both having PR6. Many PR6 websites do not have enough pages with high PR. It's worthwhile to get a backlink from high PR websites and high PR webpage.
Thanks for the sharing about the backlink program.

Hi Eileen, that's great! I think there are some faithful silent followers of my blogs too. I have noticed many return visitors from the statcounter that I put in my blog.
The statcounter is the invisible kind. I wont know who they are, even though the country of origin is there in the report.
Actually there are many dead blogs in the cyberspace. I have seen many bloggers give up blogging after a few months.

it's sad whent he bloggers give up after month. i have a podcast and have changed hosts twice but it stays the same, the podcast that is. i enjoy doing the podcast as much as i enjoy blogging.

What is a podcast, marrie?

That's just so nice. Exactly part of what I want my blog to represent to others too. It's good to maintain at least one..

That's just so nice. Exactly part of what I want my blog to represent to others too. It's good to maintain at least one..

That's just so nice. Exactly part of what I want my blog to represent to others too. It's good to maintain at least one...

I'm sorry for the duplicates. The PC just got stuck.

Hi Jayzelle, the problem is "benefits" in what way. To be very frank, many top blogs have more than a hundred comments per post, most of the comments are from bloggers who want to get backlink.
That is not really the best form of "benefits". Even when I have a post reflecting on real estate in Singapore, one real estate agent comments and link to his property website. That is not the kind of benefit I want. However, I dont mind having someone making use of my blogs to get backlinks.

Maybe the benefit is in the information you are sharing. For instance if you gave financial advice on how to become better financially educated to make better investment decisiions many people might benefit from this.

Yes I agree. mine as about technology for the blind, my rants about colledge, updates for the podcast, and more. keep the topics and advice you give spread out in my opinion.

My blog is in a coma, lol! I had the best of intentions but I have a time management issue and just never get around to posting to it. I guess I need to figure out how to do simple and frequent posts and then graduate to less frequent longer SEO posts.

wordress is your friend there. I love the interface and thts what the klango program uses for there blogs. god luck in your blogging.

Hi Rg, sorry for the late reply, I dont know how I manage to miss out your post.
I suggest that you dont give up on your old blog.
You can create another blog (not directly from Wordpress, otherwise you have restriction on monetizing), and give it a wider niche, so that you can write about anything and everything.
You dont have to worry about niche or anything. The writing sites have so many articles of different niches, and yet they are getting readers from search engines.
After that, you can import the old blog, and re-published the blog posts. You can name it as recap on life or something like that.
I'm using blogspot for easier monetizing with Google Adsense. The template not very fantastic, if you can find better template, you can import into blogspot. Otherwise use wordpress but dont sign up directly, sign up through linkbuck or others that allow monetizing.

Hi Canellita, I take a long, long time to understand the purpose of backlinking.
When we used keywords to write articles, that is internal seo technique.
When we do backlinking, that is external seo technique. For example, you provide the url to your blog and Helium's page from the profile in mylot here. That is considered as one link. The purpose is two-folds. One is for search engine robot. When it crawls through your profile here, it will follow the link to crawl and index your blog. Another is for readers. Anyone interested to see your blog can click on the link to your blog.
if you write articles for Hubpages, you can post the link to AC, Helium, blog in every single post. If you have 100 articles, that will be 100 backlinks.

Does this mean the "robot" is finding the helium link even if no one clicks on it from my myLot profile?

Yes, that is the meaning of backlinking.
when I check the Google webmaster page for incoming link, I can see the links from Helium, mylot, and other places where I put my profile. Hardly anyone check my profile in Helium and clicks on the link to access my blogs. I have statcounter to monitor the traffic sources. Yet the search engine spiders follow the link from Helium to my blogs, and from my blogs to Helium.

Very interesting. I am going to have to start placing more links! I almost have enough articles on specific topics to start doing summaries for hubpages where I can add a "more..." link to the articles.

Hi Canellita, you can actually rewrite the information and link back to the articles in other places.
By the way, do you have Adsense account. Hubpages does not pay, you have to use Adsense account to make money out of the articles.
It's a great place to learn about seo and networking with seo experts.

Hi Elrener, different bloggers have different definition of traffic and traffic sources.
Some bloggers apparently want return visits, that means more regulars and friends who read every post.
Many bloggers love traffic from search engines, because traffic from search engines mean more click on the google adsense.
so using traffic is not really a good measure, unless you define the traffic source and see what type of visitors you want.

haha Marrie, it's surprising that many people love to read about ranting and random thoughts.
Maybe it makes them feel better, that someone is going through the same thing. if I had started blogging when I suffered from wisdom tooth, I bet I would have 100 posts complaining about toothache.

Marrie what kind of technology for the blind do you feature on your blog?

lol. Hey that's fun . sometimes vent yoru frustration about that baby i that blog. you might get some support and advice from those rants. good luck.

It's a fun blog with learning and great articles about babies. Also, I run a diaper cake business out of my home.:)

haha Gina, when you talk about your pregnancy and baby, you have endless things to talk about!
Even a pet owner can talk non-stop about his or her pet, and a car owner can talk hours about the car.
The best part about blogging is that nobody going to pick fault with my grammar and rejects my writings.

Hi Getbrowser, I agree with your definition of successful blogs.
I think it is very stressful to blog for money, if the blogger hates to write. It's very tough to maintain a blog, do all the backlining if the interest in blogging is not there.
it's never a good idea to get free articles from article directory for all the blog posts. The blog will never kick off.