There are several factors that affect whether you can say that your blog is going to be a successful blog and earn you a decent income. Not all factors apply to every income method and not everyone will agree with them all, so here is my list!

Page Rank
First and foremost, the easiest to measure is Google’s Page Rank. A lot of systems measure you by this ranking, but in reality, it does not actually say anything about your website. A high Page Rank does not guarantee visitors and a low Page Rank site can get plenty of visitors.

So yes, on most systems where you are trying to earn money, the higher your Page Rank the better you will do, but aside from that it is just a badge to wear.

Number of Backlinks
Most systems that report this measure Yahoo backlinks, because Google displays a lower answer whereas Yahoo seems to report every link it finds.

Again, it can be a pointless measure of success. It is quite easy to get loads of low ranking websites pointing to your website and it does not guarantee success. But advertisers like to see high backlink counts in the hope that they will also gain benefit from a mention on your pages.

Technorati Ranking
If it worked fully, this might be a half decent measure. It includes only links from the content of other blogs, taken from their RSS feeds. So comments and link directories are excluded. You then get allocated a Technorati Authority based on your relative position in terms of how many new links they have found for your site in the past few months.

So again, it is just a way of counting links. But so many good blogs are unable to get themselves listed that not having a Technorati Authority should not really mean anything.

Alexa Ranking
At last – not a measure of links! Using the various Toolbar Button and the Alexa widget, this system can count how many visitors your website has and then rates you against other sites, worldwide and locally. It is also able to capture information about search terms and a few other bits.

An excellent idea and a good measure, if only it was not so distorted! Because it depends on the installation of the Toolbar Button or the website Alexa widget, not all visits are recorded. Only those technical people with an interest have installed the Toolbar Button, so the counts are limited.

Actual Visitor Stats
This is the only true way of measuring whether a blog is actually successful, but not something that often happens. The problem is that it requires extra code to be inserted to the header of the code to track visitors. Extra code that slows down the loading of the page. And this extra code is needed for every monitoring system. Not really efficient!

In conclusion, for a blog to be successful as a paid blog, it needs plenty of good links back from other websites. Work on this correctly to also drive visitors to your site and you have everything covered.