Yesterday, I read a very interesting post on Avinash Kaushik’s ‘Web Analytics 2.0′ blog, Occam’s Razor.
Avinash is author of “Web Analytics: AN HOUR A DAY” and a speaker on web analytics at various conferences and teaching programs. His blog has some very cool information about analyzing your web presence.
The post I read was called “Blog Metrics: Six Recommendations For Measuring Your Success”.
As an exercise, I decided to measure two or three of my main blogs to see how they stack up against the indices Avinash mentions. Here’s the analysis for this blog, “Money.Power.Wisdom”
#1 – Raw Author Contribution:
109 posts since June 19th, 2007
Words in Posts 61,939
So, the (Number of Posts / Number of Months Blogging) value is: 21.8
And the (Number of Words In Post / Number of Posts) value is: 568
As Avinash says, this is NOT a mention of quality, but an indicator of how prolific your blogging is… and at 22 posts a month, I’m pretty prolific!
# 2. Holistic Audience Growth
ShortStat tells me this blog has 8225 visits since 8 Jul 2007
AwStats data (can’t believe I haven’t set up a Google Analytics tab for this blog yet!) shows:
Oct 2007 – 7,078 unique visitors and 51,174 page views
Nov 2007 – 5,525 unique visitors and 38,481 page views
(upto 19th)
Avinash says ‘It is important to measure the trend, numbers in each month by themselves are less interesting.’
The trend is indeed interesting to me – because growth is almost STATIC! I need to put more focused effort into MARKETING this blog than just posting to it.
‘Offsite’ Audience Growth aka RSS/Feed Subscribers
This metric won’t be quite accurate for this blog, because I only put up a Feedburner link on October 7th, and haven’t done enough to encourage people to sign up for the RSS feed. Still, for what it’s worth, here are the figures:
136 RSS subscribers
7 new subscribers a day on average
I agree with Avinash on this, “I would take ten extra feed subscribers over a hundred visitors.”
# 3. Conversation RateConversation Rate = Number of Visitor Comments / Number of Posts
For this blog, 250/109 = 2.29
(I’ve subtracted the 20% comments I have made)
There’s some discussion happening here, but still the ‘conversation co-efficient’ of this blog is LOW. C’mon guys – share YOUR thoughts 
I’m also more ‘wordy’ than my audience! My blog posts have a total of 61,939 words, while comments have 25,411 words. Hmm… I should maybe talk less?!
# 4. “Citations” / “Ripple Index”
From Occam’s Razor: “People talk about you, discuss you point, throw up on you, praise you. Citations. To measure Citations I use Technorati rank.”
Here’s mine – 172,010
Which could be disheartening – if I forgot I started at a rank of over 4 MILLION!
Unfortunately, I don’t know how to track historic trends for this data, but I will be keeping track from now going forward, to see how this progresses over the following months.More fascinating to me is the concept of a “Ripple Index”.
“Ripple Index – how many blogs, cite you and link back to you over time, and is that number growing?”Ripple Index: Number of Unique Blogs that link to your Blog.
From Technorati, that number is now at 52 – not great, but in that list are many high profile blogs, which is nice
# 5. Cost
1) Technology (Hardware / Software) – estimated at $308.40 for web hosting and domain name. All my software is ‘free’
2) Time – approximately 2 to 3 hours a week (@ $100 an hour, that’s $10,000 to $16,000 a year)
3) Opportunity Cost – intangible, as I blog in my spare time, mainly
TOTAL COST: Annually, $13,308.40 (averaging everything) + a hard to measure opportunity cost
# 6. Benefit (ROI: Return on Investment)
My blog is worth $7,903.56
My blog is worth $7,903.56.
How much is your blog worth?
ROI: ( -40.6% )I should STOP blogging! Oh, I forgot – I’m using this as my tax write-off
Seriously, though, this blog pays-off in many ways for the effort, time and money invested in it. So go ahead blogging – and read Avinash’s nice article, measure the metrics for your own blog, and keep those numbers growing… FAST.
Recommended Reading: “Blog Metrics: Six Recommendations For Measuring Your Success”
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Great analysis, thanks for playing along. It made a interesting read.
My goal was to push the thought boundary and it does look like you are already thinking differently about what to do based on your analysis. That is great!
Couple thoughts:
* You should keep blogging. Remember the last element of ROI in my blog post: Unquantifiable Value.
* Definitely install Google Analytics, you’ll get very indepth data, including keywords and referring sites and content consumption. Then you can truly become a data junkie!
* In my late night blogging I made a mistake about opportunity cost. It is value of what else could you do if you were not blogging. So the formula is not tech + time + opportunity cost. It would be technology + time costs, and is that worth the opportunity cost.
I had updated my post earlier today. Apologies for the confusion.
Thanks again,
Avinash.