What Do You Consider A Successful Blog?

During our Big Money Blogger panel, a question was asked what was the one key tip to give to a blogger to help them be successful. My answer was just simply to write great content. Now I would have had many things more to add but it wasnt a "name your top 10 tips to have a successful blog" so I just answered the question with the best answer I could which was to provide quality content. During the panel we had access to see twits and I noticed this one: When it came to general Q&A the statement/question this person asked me basically what he had twitted and I responded that I agreed there were a lot of blogs out there with great content but nobody reads. I think that is pretty much a no brainer. I also went on to talk about how I am now in my 4th year of blogging and I post at least 1 blog post per day. I also made a statement that I did not think it would be possible for someone to blog as much as I do for 4 years and not be successful. I posed the question to the audience and nobody volunteered their website but it was a relatively small audience. I think the big question is what is your definition of success for a blog? Money? Many people view a blog by how much money it makes. ShoeMoney.com in 2008 will make over 400k in revenue and after all the prizes, server costs, and general bs it should profit well over 350k. A lot of that is due to bringing on someone dedicated to handling sponsorships and advertising. I never accepted any money for advertising until last year (2007). I am not sure exactly where shoemoney.com would be placed in the top 50 most read blogs on the internet but I am guessing its revenues are up there. Readers? Shoemoney.com is a big fish in a small pond. Its hard for me to imagine this site getting more viewership and readers then it does.... but of course that happens every day pretty much has continued to happen since I started the site. The shoemoney.com domain gets between 25,000 and 30,000 unique visitors per day and with RSS and other stuff the reach could be as big as 50k people per day. Now as far as success goes if you look at sites like TechCrunch who have a RSS of over 1 million readers its hard to say this is very successful only reaching 50k visitors per day with just the reader criteria. John Chow has a great statement during our panel saying that he writes 2.8 blog posts per day on average and has since his blog started. He wrote 2.8 blog posts back when it made no money and he writes 2.8 blog posts per day now that it makes over 30k per month. He also says if it goes back to making nothing he will still write 2.8 blog posts per day. John's statement is a lot like how I feel. I wrote blog posts every day for 2 years before this site ever made a dime and if someday it makes zero money again I will still write posts. Money is not the motivation for this blog for me. So getting back to the issue I think the most common thing you see with "successful" bloggers is they have trouble defining what a successful blog even is.... Because to them/us the ability just to be able to write our thoughts on a web log was the whole goal from the start ;)