In my opinion, blogging and book writing go hand-in-hand. All it takes to bridge the gap from blog to book is a bit more forethought, discipline, and structure, and of course a publisher, and BOOM! you’ve got a book. Well, there’s a bit more to it than that. My experience co-authoring a book (The Art of SEO) was nothing like that. But still, it’s nice to romanticize the process — simply assemble your blog posts into a cohesive structure and send it off to a publisher. What could be simpler?

More often than not the author’s blog is an afterthought. The book came first. Then the blog came second as the book’s marketing vehicle, a complement/supplement. I’m not knocking it, but it’s great to see a high-quality blog turn into a high-quality book.

As both an author and a blogger, I can really appreciate when a blogger succeeds in transforming their blog into a book. It’s inspiring. One of my favorites is PostSecret, which was turned into a whole series of books. More prototypical examples of blog-to-book projects are The Long Tail (blog / book) and The Search (blog / book). Both are excellent blogs, and excellent books. Sometimes Twitter feeds turn into books too, like S*it My Dad Says. That’s some funny stuff. Now it looks like CEO blogger Steve Spangler is coming out with a book too. His is called Naked Eggs and Flying Potatoes. A curious title. In actuality I think his book is more of an amalgamation of his video content than his blog posts, but nonetheless the finished book looks impressive. Congrats Steve!

Folks often ask me if I’m going to write another book. My answer: I doubt it. It’s too painful (like birthing a baby, though, as a man, I can’t truly appreciate the pain of childbirth), and it pays less than minimum wage if you work out the numbers. Folks will then chime in with “Yeah, and why bother with a physical book anyways when everybody’s migrating online!” That I don’t agree with. There are a very large group of holdouts — me included — who still prefer the feel of printed books, who enjoy the experience of curling up with a good book rather than a laptop or ebook reader. And yes I own an iPad, but I don’t read books on it. And I don’t plan to anytime soon. Call me a Luddite.

One of the coolest things about business blogging is the social interaction and community that is built when readers leave meaningful comments. Like a good story, a post elicits a response from the reader. As your community develops, the value of your brand increases. But this warm and fuzzy feeling that people get about your brand as they interact with you on your blog can be hard to measure and quantify. That’s where blog interaction metrics come in.

Building a blog to one or more interaction metrics can help you focus on what’s important – brand engagement.

Do you measure a successful post by the number of readers, bookmarks added to del.ic.ious, diggs, comments, number or quality of backlinks, or a combination of all the above? Some metrics have a place in your blog marketing scorecard, like number of comments. And some do not, like number of trackbacks (unless you like counting spammers — and that you could do all day!). Because the last thing you need is just more data for the sake of data.

Avinash Kaushik came up with some really nifty blog success metrics that really resonate with me. I bet they’ll resonate with you too. They are:

• Raw author contribution (posts per month and words per post)
• Audience growth (onsite & offsite, visitors and unique visitors)
• “Conversion” rate (comments per post)
• Citations (blog inlinks, Technorati rank)
• Ripple Index (# of unique blogs linking to your blog)
• Cost (time, hardware/software technology, opportunity cost
• Benefit / ROI (comparative vs. direct vs. “non-traditional” vs. unquantifiable)

As you start measuring the above and then gauging the success of what you’re doing on your blog based on these metrics, you can tie your activities back to something more meaningful than just the “hits” you’re generating.

If you want to learn more about metrics, I encourage you to watch the archived recording of a “Website Metrics and ROI” webinar that Avinash and I presented last year. No registration required. Just click and watch (or download). It’s 100 minutes of the two of us talking about our favorite metrics — not just for blogging, but also email marketing, web marketing, search marketing, and more. And if you just want to scan over our Powerpoint slides before you invest 100 minutes of your time (and I don’t blame you — time is precious!), here’s the PPT file. Enjoy!

What blog metrics do you value most? How do your readers interact with you? Do you have any particular reporting tools you recommend? Your interactivity is welcome and invited.