A model for measuring aerosol mass concentration by an optical particle counter is presented using the conception of the average mass. In this model, to understand the meaning of the pulse height distribution of particles which is used to inverse mass concentration, the relationship among intensity distribution in the optical sensing volume, particle shape, and the pulse height distribution is discussed. To solve the instability of the equivalent factor, a novel two-step calibration method is proposed. The experimental results demonstrate that mass concentrations calculated by the model are in good agreement with those measured by a norm-referenced instrument. For samples of soot and air, the slopes of fitting lines of data points are 0.9582 and 0.9220, and the correlation coefficients are 0.9991 and 0.9965, respectively.