While it may seem impressive to earn $1,000, $5,000 or even $35,000 a month from your blogging efforts, I feel that the raw number can be a crude way of judging the “success” of your blog and will not be as meaningful as using other metrics.

A more significant statistic is to determine your average revenue per unit (ARPU) or income earned per visitor.

For example, if you have 100,000 visitors and your blog earnings are $5,000 and you compare it against a smaller blog with 35,000 visitors and earnings of $4,000. Which is better?

Let’s skip the superficials $5,000 versus $4,000 for the moment and look at ARPU. For the large blog, ARPU is $5,000 divided by 100,000 or 5 cents per visitor, while the smaller blog’s ARPU is 11.4 cents.

The smaller blog is twice as effective at generating income as the large blog and though it trails the large blog in terms of total readership, I’ll go one step further to say that assuming you’re not a casual or hobby blogger and you’re blogging as a business, the end goal should be income generation, rather than the “generating eyeballs/impressions” game that was prevalent in year 2000 with dotcom mania.

If anything, sustainable blogs are going back-to-basics, focusing on a solid business foundation and continuous growth – all supported by a sensible business model and sustainable income generation.

If the pieces are in place, you have the makings of a profitable blog business.

For more blogging strategies and tips, check out Secret Blog Weapon.

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Spurred by national pride and massive growth in Internet adoption in China, CCTV.com, the site run by national broadcaster China Central TV, drew more than 100 million unique visitors during the 2008 Olympic Games. WebTrends Analytics documented an average of more than 6 million unique visitors each day. In comparison, NBC, which maintained broadcast rights to the Games in the United States, reported an average of 4.3 million unique users a day on its Olympics web site. Yahoo!, which also featured extensive online video from the Olympics, averaged 4.7 million, according to media accounts.

“The Beijing Olympics marked the coming of age for the Internet in China,” said Alex Yoder, CEO of WebTrends, a leading provider of web analytics and online marketing solutions. “CCTV.com attracted more than 100 million online visitors for the Olympic Games by providing the right content at the right time for a large and ever-growing online audience.”

• An increase of more than 2.5 minutes in the average time each visitor remained on CCTV.com, to nearly 11.5 minutes during the Olympics.
• The opening ceremonies and other activities on Aug. 8 generated the most traffic on any single day, nearly 8.5 million visits. Aug. 9 and Aug. 18, the day Chinese athlete Liu Xiang was scheduled to race in the 110 meter hurdles, attracted the second and third highest visitor counts, respectively.
• The busiest hour of online traffic was from 11 a.m. to noon on Aug. 18. Nearly 900,000 visits were tallied during the hour in which Xiang was scheduled to race. The second busiest hour was during the opening ceremonies.

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