What do Blog Stats mean?

Blogging isn’t just about writing great content. Every blogger will tell you there’s a lot more to it than that! You have to interact with your loyal fans on Facebook and twitter, develop and maintain your website and most importantly, get traffic! All of these things make a blog successful and there are a number of services on the internet that can measure the success of each area.

We collect data on all our contributors so you can see exactly how well they are blogging. Here’s what we get…

Twitter Followers

Pretty much every blogger is on twitter these days and it’s a great platform for meeting other bloggers for support and starting conversations with fans of your blog. As your follower numbers grow you’ll have an increasing amount of traffic to your blog, more conversations and more influence over what people talk about on twitter. If you’re just starting out you’ll have maybe a few hundred followers, if you’ve been tweeting for a few years you may have thousands! It takes time and effort to build up a following but steady growth is a good indication of your activity.

Facebook Fans

Aside from your personal Facebook account you can start fan pages too and your blog should have one. It’s a place where people on Facebook will hear about your blog and discuss posts (if you use an app to pull in a feed). You can check out our Facebook fan page to see what we do. It’s another good way to get traffic to your blog.

Klout Score

Fans and follower counts are all very well but they don’t tell you the real story. You could have 20,000 followers but if you’re not active and interesting your tweets wont get noticed. Klout is a service that can measure just how active you are on both Twitter and Facebook. It can also tell you how influential your messages are, how often they get retweeted and mentioned. Good scores start around 40.

MozRank

Google’s PageRank has long been a rather inacurate measuring tool of how good your website content is. It’s hardly been updated in the last 12 months and is widely believed to be obsolete these days as search engine rankings are clearly based on a page rank we don’t see. MozRank from SEO-Moz is a much more reliable scoring system based on much of the same algorithms as PageRank. It’s updated daily and the score is much more accurate, giving you a score with 2 decimal points rather than the flat pagerank scores that are only updated every 6 months. MozRank is an accurate representation of how well formed your web pages are and how much traffic you receive. A good score is around 4 and above. SEO-Moz have some great SEO tools worth checking out if you want to improve your search engine rankings. Find out more about SEO-Moz and MozRank here.

Alexa

Owned by the online giant Amazon, Alexa has long been the website ranking tool of choice for many. It takes anonymous logs of site visits from people with the Alexa toolbar installed in an attempt to rank all of the websites in the world. it’s famously inacurate and the scores given shouldn’t be taken as a true representation of a website’s ranking. None-the-less it’s here to stay so it’s worth taking note of the score.