Judging from the outside, being a blogger or maintaining a blog seems a pretty cool job. With nothing very difficult to do and even sometimes enjoying funny moments and interesting tasks, across time a community can form itself. Definitely the interaction with various, unknown people who share the same passions, is beneficial and may be addictive. From my experience I can say with all my heart that it is fabulous to be the one who provides the platform for interaction for a certain community, meaning the posts. Each bloggers, but most probably all the true specialists in any fields are asking themselves if they are really producing quality work or not.

The blogosphere is very active, in the sense that is perpetual growing resulting in a fierce competition, having a huge and positive influence on the quality of the blogs. A blogger is aware of the fact that at anytime someone can be better than him or has a better post/blog. This shouldn’t restrict the other blogger of further posting; much more it should be a reason to be more competitive, thus increasing the quality of post in general. It is quite normal for each blogger to check his evolution; in fact you can’t predict the future without knowing the past. I tried to establish some criteria which are check points in the process of self analysis; without a doubt these aren’t perfect, I will highly appreciate any interventions from the readers which will carefully be studied by me and I will insert the ideas in a future post, more complete and attractive. Enjoy my list!

1. You know the blogs in your field by heart

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Each blogger has his specific topics, some are posting about medicine, others about arts and others about web design, there is a countless palette of hot and traffic bringing subjects. A very good blogger should know by heart the most important blogs in his niche; it is wrong and stupid (sorry if I am too categorical) if someone really studied these by heart. The normal evolution is to keep these in mind due to the frequent use and this doesn’t suppose any mechanical memorization. Everything in our life should be logical and this criterion passes the test of logical validation: nobody is born the perfect blogger and without learning is impossible to advance and this is the effect of hard and never ending studying. The best resources to learn about blogging are definitely the blogs itself so don’t stop reading, if it is possible, read everything in the niche.

2. You have enough connections with a lot of people in the field

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A good blogger is a guy who has multiple posts on various high visited websites or has his own blog which is well maintained, but anyway a good blogger needs to be very prolific. The creativity of each blogger is hard or impossible to measure, yet an apparently strange but cool indicator of your activity of blogging is the level of interacting with other bloggers or owners of blogs. Only an active blogger can maintain many connections with other good bloggers, so if tomorrow morning your Inbox is full with new emails from other persons related to blogosphere then you are on the good way. Regarding the number…there isn’t a perfect ratio but more is better.

3. Usually, your guest posts have more retweets and comments

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Another feature which should measure the potential of a blogger is the comments and the number of retweets. On your own blog or on other ones, as guest posts, the posts of a better blogger are more commented and retweeted. It is wrong to compare posts on different blogs because the visitors and their preferences aren’t the same so each article should be compared to the previous on the same website.

4. You read the latest posts of the most important blogs everyday

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A good blogger must be everyday updated in order to find out and learn the latest techniques but also to avoid publishing very similar subjects. A “half-mistake” of any blogger is to not search for similar posts in the Internet before starting to write a new article. I totally exclude the possibility of copying ideas, because a real blogger can’t do it, but before writing something, a pro should study the previous articles to see if he can bring something new and worthy to the market, else the idea should be abandoned. In a nutshell, a good blogger must be updated with the latest posts, it is unbelievable to have success writing about IE6 and its features when Microsoft just released the ninth version of it.

5. On the social networks you have a lot of friends and requests of advice

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It is only a necessary condition but it isn’t an actual state that revealing that you are for sure a good blogger, in fact anyone can be very active on these mediums, having a lot of friends but nothing related to blogging. In the most cases the bloggers are very active in these networks which allow a handy solution to communicate worldwide but at the same time it is a great modality to maintain a strong dialogue with the members of the community around the blog.
My recommendation: pay attention to these amazing tools but your focus should be on the effective blogging!

6. The majority of the posts are originals and innovative

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Any blogger wins popularity if his posts are different from the usual ones but has the same or superior quality. In a blogosphere full of amazing sources of information and inspiration, nothing original has few chances of being virally spread. It is quite simple to say –“Hey, try to be original” but it is required to obtain traffic and finally to name you as a professional blogger/writer.
I will appreciate any opinion related to this checklist and if anyone finds another point, please use the comment form!