Your blog is a bunch of valuable information, not just for your readers but as well as for you about your readership. When the content of your blog has grown and you devote much of your time in it, it is important to watch closely on its performance. But in what way will you know if your blog is booming?

Bloggers have differing opinions on which metric of your blog's performance is the most indicative of success, but the best way to measure it is to take several factors into account over longer periods of time - from month to month, for instance. In this way you avoid thinking of success in narrow terms (defined by only one or two metrics) and also getting unduly disappointed or excited from the inevitable occasional dips and spikes in your traffic.

Below are five important metrics that will help you understand the performance of your blog, and where it needs more work.

1. Traffic:

Traffic is the main metric for every web site owner. How many visitors are coming to your site? Over a period of one month, you can now obtain a pretty accurate idea of how visitors perceive your website and whether or not they will come back. This is also a catch-all metric for keeping an eye on your ranking in various search engines and Alexa.

2. Growth rate

As important as this month's metrics is how much increase (or decrease) there is between months, and across longer periods - three months, six months or a year. You can measure all your metrics every month, but it's also crucial to see if you're moving ahead, staying steady or dropping off your readers' radars.

3. Participation

Are people who come to your blog participating in it? Are they leaving comments and sending e-mails? This is a hard metric to measure scientifically but every blogger can experience surges and drops in reader participation personally and put them in the context of other metrics like traffic and subscriptions.

4. Followers

An easy, if not always accurate metric, this is crucial for bloggers to know how many people are signing on to receive future updates and become, for now at least, regular readers of your blog. Followers cannot only follow you through RSS feed subscriptions but also on Twitter, Facebook and Google Follow. As you communicate with your readers across the internet, you can also get a better sense of the extent of overlap and reader involvement. So 10 subscribers and 10 followers on Twitter certainly does not mean you have 20 followers, but it does mean that the ones who are following you on multiple streams are dedicated and deserve special attention.

5. Back-links

Back-links are a crucial metric not only to understand where your most targeted traffic is coming from but also to discover what kind of blog posts and information are most valuable to fellow bloggers, who can bring in their own visitors to your blog. Back-links are directly and crucially connected to your search-rankings, so this is another metric that not only deserves attention but also conscious dedication.

We have not included "profit" as an essential metric because it's a result of your blog's performance more than an indicator of it, and also because there are differing ways of making money through blogs. But if you're investing money in your blog and also making money from it, then of course profit is one more way in which you can clearly calculate your blog's performance and use the metrics above to make it more profitable, going forward.

By gauging your readership on these five important sectors, you can get perfect insight into the direction where your blog can find its niche and biggest successes. Look at your blog metrics as insight into your readers, generated by your own content, and use its successes and disappointments to plot and refine your blog's future path, and your own choices as a blogger.