Meaningful Blogging Benchmarks
They aren’t all that easy to come by

In the comments section of my post about my blogging goals, Katie Delahaye Paine asked:

“Shouldn't there by be some kind of a compilation or industry average for PR blogs?”

I think this would be a great service to get this benchmarking information; unfortunately, most meaningful stats require you to own the site in order to get them and I haven’t seen an aggregating service that adequately serves these stats up for PR blogs.

And not many blogs are publicizing their stats as I did.

While they are very fun (I have 18 links from 11 sites according to Technorati), I don't think that links alone aren't a good enough measure. For instance, you get credit for self-linking to previous posts (for instance). Other bloggers complain that Technorati doesn't update its numbers frequently or accurtely enough.

And Pub Sub is even more erratic. I finally was listed there this week and my stats look pretty wacky. I shot up to number 4 over the weekend then sunk to position 13. Not bad, but I think I got credit for the entire time I've been blogging in just one week.

Here are the metrics I think are meaningful and why:

1. Time spent on entries (indicating interest),
2. # of unique visits (indicating traffic),
3. number of returning visitors (indicating stickiness) and
4. number of referrals (indicating visitors that came from links on other sites)

If you happen to know how we can benchmark these metrics against PR (and also other) blogs, please chime in.