While attending the How to Hire a Professional Blogger For Your Business session at Blog World Expo, it was very interesting to learn that you have to know your performance numbers and how they work in order to really understand what it takes to make money as a hired blogger.

As part of this series on what you need to know about hiring a professional blogger and being hired, let’s look at what the pros had to say about performance numbers and metrics and what you need to know before you go pro.

Gregory Go of About.com Guide to Online Business made it clear to the crowded room about how the numbers drive payment and drives success when it comes to paying a blogger. “If you are looking to make money blogging for a company or blog network, you have to understand the metrics.”

Gregory listed three key web analytics that should be used to set a price for paying a blogger.

1. Consistency - Word Count Metric: Number of posts per week or month published with a minimum word count per post.
2. Internal Metrics: Numbers based upon direct interaction and actions such as comment count, feed or newsletter subscribers, and direct sales generated.
3. External Metrics: Performance compared to the general Internet/blogosphere metrics. This includes page view counts and referrer or inbound links.

While few pay solely based upon one of these three metrics, most blogs and blog networks compensate bloggers based upon a combination of these numbers. read more

SEOMoz has a pretty fascinating in-depth look at the top blogs in the blogosphere - and does so by looking at some pretty creative data slices.

Here’s how he started:

Last Friday, (August 15th, 2008) I took a snapshot of the Internet’s top blogs. This freeze frame identifies the blogs that have developed the skills necessary to compete. Unlike traditional top blog lists, I did not seek to place blogs in order of perceived importance. Instead, I combined public lists of top blogs ordered by the amount of inlinks (Technorati), amount of community subscriptions (Bloglines), ability to start and follow trends (BlogPulse) and the ability to thrive in foreign markets (Wikio). I then weighed each individual blog against its all encompassing internet performance using SEOmoz’s Trifecta Tool. The result is a list of blogs that have proven to be powerful in all aspects of Internet success.

You’ll have to take a look at the post to see the results as most of the data is in graphs… but it’s certainly a different way to rank and look at the characteristics of the top blogs.

If you’re a tech blogger, there’s a good chance your ranking has gone up. By the way, in the Alexa world, that is NOT a good thing.

The traffic data Website is no longer relying solely on their toolbar to rank sites. Instead, they will be aggregating data from “multiple sources.” Pretty cryptic, eh?

The reality is, whether you but stock in these numbers or not, they do affect the way your blog/Website does business. Since Alexa has been on the scene for over 10 years, many people take what they say seriously.

You will also notice that historic data is now only available from the previous nine months. This window will be expanded over the next few months as the site recalculates. They also promise new features will be rolled out in the near future.

I noticed about a 30k drop (that’s good!) on my blog.

How has the recalculation affected your corner of the Web?