A purpose is important. Equally important is a direction. Perhaps even more is to have a goal.
When I started the blog I set goals for myself, mostly for motivation purposes. Three comments for each blog post (qualitative goal) and to get a Technorati ranking of under 10,000 by December 2006 (quantitative goal).
I am so thrilled that Occam’s Razor met that goal in three months! I am quite amazed at that because I did not think there would be enough people interested in the content to read it and link to it (or debate it on their blogs).
There is a lot of good content on the web and the reason the blog achieved its goal so fast is because you read it, because you comment on it (I like you just a smidgen more!), because you link to it, because you help evangelize it. I am deeply grateful for your support and help. Thank you.
Couple pictures…
May 16th 2006:
Aug 16th 2006:
The interesting thing is that on the goal page I wrote that it would take me 530 links from 162 sites to get to under 10k. The latter number, unique sites, is more important in the ranking. It is a testament to how fast the blogospehere is growing that it took 622 links from 225 blogs to get to that goal. So competition is immense, and that is a good thing.
Thanks again so very much (Now that my goal is met I can close shop and move on! Just kidding).
Competitive Intelligence Analysis: Tips, Reports and Best Practices post coming tomorrow.
Via 
Congratulations Avinash !
Congrats! :)
Great! I've been noticing your moving up for Web Metrics and Web Analytics! BTW, now that HitWise figured out that they are a Web Analytics blog – I'm no longer #1 for Web Analytics.
I guess they got the idea from reading your blog – must have decided to apply the right tags, now they beat everyone.
Well done! and truly amazing, but Quality makes it all. Continue on the great stuff!
Best Laurent
Good site. One point: 3 comments per post is a quantitative goal, I'm not sure why you say that it is a qualitative goal..
John: Great point. Think of it this way, the goal is for how much qualitative feedback I want to shoot for at the minimum. The value is in the words people write, but I want atleast x number of that "voice of the customer".
Maybe it is just that I am a quant guy and have to make everything about numbers and how to measure things, even soft and fuzzy qualitative things that don't always lend themselves to being quantified. : )
Thanks so much for your comment (you are helping me meet my goal target!!! : )).