How Do You Measure Your Blog’s Success?
October 1st, 2007 by CourtMeasuring the success of a blog isn’t as simple as it seems. Most of the methods that are being used are actually pretty flawed. Here are some of the metrics, along with their strengths and weaknesses:
PageRank
PageRank could be the #1 worst way to measure the success of your blog. There are some awesome blogs that still have PR0 since PageRank hasn’t updated for over 5 months.
Strengths
- PageRank is calculated by using the amount and quality of links a site gets. It is harder to manipulate than a lot of the other metrics.
- Right now good PageRank is accepted almost universally as a ’status’ symbol.
- You may (ok you do) have an advantage in this arena if your site is older.
Weaknesses
- You’re definitely getting hosed if your site is less than 1 year old.
- PageRank isn’t exported often, so it’s constantly out of date.
- You could in theory have 10,000,000 page views per month and still have a PR0.
Technorati Rankings
Technorati rankings aren’t really that impressive but I think they are better than PageRank to measure the success of your blog.
Strengths
- The real-time nature of Technorati means that they find links instantly.
- Technorati updates almost daily.
Weaknesses
- Technorati rankings are pretty easy to manipulate using link trains and other methods.
- They don’t take into consideration links from sites that aren’t blogs. You could get a front page link on Yahoo.com and it wouldn’t do anything for your Technorati ranking.
Alexa Rankings
Alexa rankings are interesting because they are the most accurate way to gauge your traffic against other blogs. (Just because it’s the most accurate way doesn’t mean its very accurate.)
Strengths
- You can look at your traffic against the traffic of other blogs. It makes for a very easy comparison.
Weaknesses
- Sites that have a tech-savvy audience rank better than sites that don’t. The Alexa toolbar isn’t used by most people. This means that you can really only use this method to compare your blog against other blogs in your niche.
RSS Count
RSS count seems to be the most accurate metric to me, but I can still see some weakness in using it.
Strengths
- It’s very hard to manipulate.
- It’s very easy to compare your feed count to other sites like yours.
Weaknesses
- Maybe you don’t want to use RSS at all.
- Some blogs don’t show their feed count making it hard to compare yourself with them.
- RSS may take longer to build up than other metrics that are equally important.
Overall Thoughts
It seems to me that no single metric can be used to measure the success of a blog. Someone needs to come up with a system that takes all of these methods into account. There’s an idea for the programmers out there. What do you guys think…. is there a method worth putting much stock into?
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October 1st, 2007 at 11:17 am
I complete disagree that Alexa rank is useful. It only tells whether a site has any traffic or not. Comparing the ranks of two websites - even in the same niche - rarely tells much about how their traffic compares.
Other than that, I agree. However, depending on how you define success, there are a number of other metrics. For most blogs in the make-money-online niche, the ultimate metric of success would be monthly income.
October 1st, 2007 at 11:52 am
Hi Sutocu! As always, I value every person’s opinion.
I can tell you that based on my discussions with other people in my niche that Alexa is doing a pretty good job charting our traffic levels against each other.
It is possible that it doesn’t do as good of a job in other niches though. Additionally, until you reach a certain level of exposure Alexa doesn’t even chart you everyday, which makes it even less accurate.
October 1st, 2007 at 11:28 am
This comment has been edited to tell the world that BathSavo.info is scraping my content. Good job BathSavo, you will officially never get a link from my site.
October 1st, 2007 at 4:48 pm
lol…great idea.
October 1st, 2007 at 11:33 am
I think it can be rather hard to compare your site against other sites with the tools currently available. It does seem like several of them can be easily manipulated. I do think it would be difficult to come of with a proper tool unless all websites disclosed the actual traffic levels.
October 1st, 2007 at 11:56 am
If someone came up with something good enough, they may be able to get a link from almost every site out there. Someone needs to make a widget that really works.
October 1st, 2007 at 12:05 pm
This sounds like it would be an excellent idea for a project. Do you know any programmers that could be hired out?
October 1st, 2007 at 12:45 pm
I don’t know any personally, but they can be found on elance.com.
October 1st, 2007 at 12:00 pm
Alexa will count people who don’t have the toolbar installed. You just need to have an Alexa wdget on your pages. As long as the image loads, Alexa will count them.
October 1st, 2007 at 3:10 pm
I’ve been told that the benefit in using the widget happens when people click on it. It’s just like using alexa redirect links.
This will give a slight benefit but will not count all of your page loads.
October 1st, 2007 at 1:42 pm
2xKnight You are totally wrong I bet you read this in one of these blogs that claim to know, how to make money with a blog.
If I am sick I go to a doctor, I do not ask my barber, if you want to know about Alexa why not go to them.
Go here this is the official Alexa Blog and it lcearly says the widget does not increase your Alexa ranking http://awis.blogspot.com/2007/09/how-to-boost-your-alexa-rank.html
Court you are as always dead on especially with Alexa, if your blog is not about blogging or something technical your Alexa by definition will suck, I use my site as a perfect example.
My tool to define my success is traffic period! I look atmy daily server log and see when, what and where and I make adjustment based on that.
I consider myself a professional blogger, I wish I could say I blog to change the world, but the fact is I blog to make money so after traffic my second measure is money, right now I am around 5k a month from Bu.bulicio.us and last month Ihad a bit less traffic so how come I made a bit more money, what I concentrated this month was to keep tweaking adsense color position and was more critical on selection of banners for affiliates for each post.
Example If I post about scrapbooks than I have one adsense and a banner for an a scrapbooking software from comision junction.
But my main goal every day, every day is get more and more quality links pointing to the blog especially deep links.
We can use Technorati or StunbleUpon and others but if you do not dominate a key word in google you will sooner or later die of starvation.
Court sorry I rambled and fell of topic.
October 1st, 2007 at 3:32 pm
Nope. I said this from my experience. My Alexa rating was rock solid, until I added the widget. That’s when it started to drop.
October 1st, 2007 at 4:00 pm
No need to apologize at all! I appreciate your insight into this.
October 1st, 2007 at 3:16 pm
Another way to judge success is how much money it makes vs. time and money put into it.
If you were to buy a blog, you would want know its financials just like any business.
October 1st, 2007 at 3:20 pm
I haven’t seen any clicks out to Alexa and my score dropped by about a million since I added it to my footer.
October 1st, 2007 at 4:44 pm
James I totally understand the math behind your comment, same as when we work at a typical job where we get paid hourly.
The only thing I would like to point out is the following.
When I decided that I wanted to leave the BH arena and make a viable WH project I told my wife, and at that moment I also told her I would have about 6 months of long, long hours, we even canceled our vacation.
I go to sleep every day at 3am and I am sitting in front of my computer no later than 8:30 am.
I do not look at my blog as my little blog project, I look at it as my business venture and I act accordingly.
If I invested 500k in a Subway Franchise I would be doing the same thing, so even though the cost to start a Blogging Venture is minimum I treated as I have invested a million dollars.
So in the beginning when I was making absolutely 0 to today that I am making 5k a month it does not matter, I will keep doing the same thing every day, every day because I know that if I follow my business plan, and yes I did make one, Bu.bulicio.us should be providing me about 25k a month by this same time next year.
The reason most people fail at blogging is for the same reason they fail in a traditional business, they want the success but do not want to put the effort.
If you want to be a professional blogger than act accordingly.
October 1st, 2007 at 8:17 pm
Hey Vic, what is the factor that has brought you website so much success in such a short period of time? I noticed you write about 10 posts a day. Do you feel you have the traffic you do because of the amount of content you have put up in such a short period of time?
October 1st, 2007 at 5:39 pm
Another thing about the Alexa toolbar is that many anti-spyware/anti-virus programs block it or put Alexa.com on the IE or Firefox restricted site list. This also messes up their numbers.
I’ve seen my Alexa count climb after being static for the first few months since I added their widget waaay down at the bottom of my sidebar. But that could just be coincidence.
October 2nd, 2007 at 10:31 am
It seemed to help me quite a bit when I installed it on CourtneyTuttle.com as well. However, when I installed it on some other sites it really didn’t have the same effect.
I personally believe now that it has the same effect as Alexa redirect URLs, meaning that the widget has to be clicked on. Any effect other than that is likely coincidence.
October 2nd, 2007 at 1:24 am
Courtney, by taking Alexa, Technorati and Page Rank, it gives an idea of how a site stacks up against others in it’s genre. Counting RSS would be hard as many sites do not publish figures.
Adding in “User Voting” gives an extra dimension. See http://www.5starred.com/toplist/ which count PR, Alexa, Technorati and User Voting. Your site is presently at #15.
October 2nd, 2007 at 10:32 am
Very cool Gary, I’ll definitely check it out! Blog Ratings 2.0
October 3rd, 2007 at 2:23 am
“Blog Ratings 2.0″
Like it
Your blog already moved up to #13. If you had higher PR, you’d be top 10, perhaps even top 5.
I’ll manipulate the database as it would be interesting to see how your site would stack up with a PR5 say.
October 3rd, 2007 at 2:28 am
OK;
PR4 = you’d be 10th
PR5 = you’d be 9th
As you can see increasing by a whole point of PR does not impact greatly once you get high in the list…
The User Voting got you 2 places higher than you were - I think User Voting adds a really good dimension. Do you want a copy of the script?
October 2nd, 2007 at 7:38 am
Hey oh great one…..Thanks again for great content….Wondering! You said a site could have 10,000,000 pages and no PR. Because of the dampening factor in the algo, doesn’t the PR have to be somewhere?…or are you saying its outgoing. Keep up the good work!
October 2nd, 2007 at 10:35 am
Hey Georgia!
What I meant there is that a site can have 10,000,000 pages and not have even PR showing in the toolbar.
You are correct to say that a site with that many pages would build a certain level of PR because of the dampening factor/natural PageRank. Even when that happens, it doesn’t show in the toolbar until Google exports toolbar PageRank.
The site would have some PR, but there wouldn’t be a way to prove it.
October 2nd, 2007 at 8:08 am
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October 3rd, 2007 at 2:18 am
RSS subscribers are definately one of the more accurate ways of measuring success, however, I prefer to count the number of unique visitors and returning visitors to my sites. This tells me whether the content sucks, or if it’s turning some of those uniques into regulars.
It’s not perfect, but it’s the best solution for my needs
October 7th, 2007 at 10:11 pm
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October 9th, 2007 at 1:50 pm
I agree that PageRank is useless. I think these days a lot of sites / blogs show all of these kinds of stats and I guess the real measure of success is what is important to the site owner. For me, my rss numbers are my most important metric. I’ve seen other people desperate to break a certain rank on Technorati. Its a very personal thing.
October 22nd, 2007 at 11:49 pm
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