I’m actually surprised that a side effect of being included in various lists of top blogs from the viral garden top 25, to the Ad Age Power 150, to Peter Kim’s top 20 marketer blogs, has really got me thinking and participating in a fascinating conversation about blog metrics.
I’ve often thought that most tools that give us web metrics left missed a great deal of what makes blogs important and different. Traffic metrics like Alexa is used a lot but doesn’t account for people reading RSS who IMHO are probably a more engaged audience than people coming in from google or stumbleupon. Incoming links is what google and technorati use as an indicator of, but incoming links is really a measure of how important a blog is to other bloggers, so again not really the whole picture.
I really think Peter Kim has created a very thoughtful multimetric for his top 20 marketer blogs where he uses metrics to measure authority, attention and influence.
- Authority: 20% Technorati Authority + 20% Google PageRank
- Attention: 10% Alexa traffic
- Influence: 50% Feed subscribers
One interesting thing that came out in the comments was how to derive feedburner subscribers for blogs that don’t publish them. Seeing as it’s just a call to feedburner with the feedname as a variable you should be able to go and grab them all as long as the person uses feedburner 
Here’s Peter’s list where i’m honored to be in the top spot… for the moment
- ExperienceCurve :: 74
- Strategic Public Relations :: 70
- Listen Up! :: 57
- BeRelevant! :: 51
- Marketing Nirvana :: 49
- Conversation Agent :: 49
- Todd And – The Power To Connect :: 48
- Decker Marketing :: 45
- The Lonely Marketer :: 41
- cgm :: 37
- Flooring The Consumer :: 36
- The Marketing Excellence Blog :: 35
- Bernaisesource :: 34
- Biznology :: 34
- Cross The Breeze :: 32
- Churbuck.com :: 32
- AttentionMax :: 32
- "Turbo" Todd Watson :: 31
- Masiguy :: 31
- Community Group Therapy :: 31
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Karl, I agree with you that Pete has generated fascinating thoughts relating to measurement. Thanks for continuing the discussion here and including Flooring The Consumer.
Thanks, too, for the feedburner count instructions!
Karl,
Peter has put a lot of time and effort into that measurement and I think it’s worth it. Thanks for highlighting it! I’m planning a similar post soon.
Thanks,
Pat
I think the best metric is for people to read the posts they personally like.
Hi Karl – truth be told, you have *a lot* of subscribers. Obviously that doesn’t happen by accident. Thinking through the 30 marketer blogs on the M20 list, I’ve wondered about the role of content breadth – and concluded that it doesn’t matter. What matters most is, to David’s point, writing well and staying focused! Which in your case goes without saying.
Thanks all for the comments. True enough that the content matters and certainly focus. I often wonder if experiencecurve has enough focus, enough of a “position” in the branding sense of the word?
Karl:
The view looks very nice from this blog, thank you for publishing Peter’s list and for spreading the discussion on metrics. For the longest time my stats were split between a TypePad URL and a domain URL — I did not know any better when I started and let the two assets develop unknowingly. So while I got a lot of conversations and traffic going early on, that is now lost since I mapped the domain name to my blog
The other interesting part of this dialogue is blog focus. I have often debated with myself about it as I tend to go high level and very broad as well as deep on many topics — the lens is always marketing and communications. I concluded that my focus is the outcome — connecting ideas and people and confirmed that is the case with my readers. And I can be chatty as well.