How to identify a popular blog, my quick and easy tips.
I have been writing online conversation reports for clients for a number of years now and during that period of time it would be understandable to think that we have seen significant changes in the social channels that are influential in these reports. However, in almost all of the 60+ online conversation reports I have written, blogs are still the most influential sources for brands, whether it is business-to-business or business-to-consumer. It is for this reason that I decided to share some quick tips on how to identify an influential blog. I should add a caveat that I would use all of these tools together to give me a feel for a blog, so I wouldn’t recommend using one of these tools in isolation as sometimes on their own they can give the wrong impression. In truth, there are loads of tools and gadgets you can use to determine how influential one site is over another. I wrote a post way back in 2008 on the fact that blogger relations shouldn’t be rushed. In it I wrote:
“If you really want to communicate with bloggers my advice would be read, read, do a bit more reading and then double check what you have done before you even begin to start engaging. Believe me, if you do that and take the time out it makes it all the more rewarding when you get a positive response from a blogger like: “thanks for actually taking the time out to read my posts”.
I still agree with that statement, so if you are still interested in identifying influential blogs here are my top tips: 1. How many comments does it get? If a blog has more than three or four comments on an average post then it clearly has an audience that is engaging with it. There are thousands of blogs in the blogosphere that have no comments at all, in which case they are probably talking to nobody! Over time blogs usually gain a reputation and become more influential and that normally means they start to receive more and more comments. Depending on the sector or topic I would say a blog with around 10-30 comments per post is fairly influential and worth a closer look. 2. Check the site’s Page Rank The Google Page Rank is, as Wikipedia describes it:
“A link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page,[1] used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set.”
The Google toolbar Page Rank tool is quite a useful indicator in showing how important a site is or not. The tool shows a coloured bar – if half the bar is filled then the blog has a 5/10 page rank. The tool gives a mark out of 10 – 5/10 (like pr-squared.com has) is a fairly good score and anything around that score means the blog is pretty influential although it is not an exact science. To add the page rank tool, first download the Google toolbar, once you have downloaded that then do the following: