How To Gauge A Blog’s Real Level of Activity
There are many reasons you would want to evaluate the real activity level of a blog. You might consider being a guest post service provider on another website, have them review a product or service for you, or you just want to know how strong your competing website is. If you would like to do any of these, here is how you should be evaluating the true activity of their blog to make your judgement.
Many people use SEO metrics like the DA, Trust Flow and the keyword rankings of a website to gauge how well the website is performing. This is usually not an ideal way to evaluate a blog because a blog’s Domain Authority or Alexa rank has nothing to do with how large or active the blog’s audience actually is. A blog can have a high Alexa ranking but have an inactive or perhaps not “real” set of readers. However, how large or how active a blog’s audience is should be what you consider when evaluating the real level of activity in that blog. If you want a guest post or a review to do well on someone else’s blog, then this is what you should be taking into account.
Here are three ways you can quickly determine how active a blog is when vetting lists from your guest post submission service, and how large and engaged their readership is. With this three methods, you could potentially gauge your competition or figure out how your guest post will perform on their blog.
How Bloggers And Marketers Should Evaluate Their Blog
1. Trust Your Own Judgement
Take some time to simply browse around the blogging community to get a first impression of the assett. Your first impression usually is a good way to gauge and find out how popular the blog probably is. Here are a few things you can look out for when browsing around.
a. Find some random posts and check how many comments these posts have. That lets you see how engaged the readers are. You should also see how detailed the comments being posted are.
You should also watch out for spam comments. That usually isn’t a good sign because that indicated that this blog owner doesn’t moderate their comments.
b. You should also check out the social media buttons on random posts to see how well shared these posts are. You could particularly check out the number of shares on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. You can also use the Shareaholic Firefox addon to determine how many shares these posts have on Digg.
c. You should also click through the items on the side widgets like “Most Popular Posts” and “Recent Comments” to get an idea on how active the blog has been on recent days, and to see if readers appreciate and like the content within the blog.
2. Check Out How Popular The Post is On Twitter
It is easy to use Twitter to judge how popular a blog is, or how competitive a blog is when compared to yours. Unlike other social media platforms like Digg and StumbleUpon, Twitter isn’t dependent on your website topic or niche to determine your popularity level – it is rather universal and anything and everything gets to be tweeted for the world to see.
Therefore, you can judge how popular a blog is by seeing how much the blog gets tweeted. You can use the social media monitoring tool called Topsy to do a quick search and evaluate a blog’s popularity level. With this search, you can see which the most tweeted post was over all time, over the past month, week, day, or even hour. You can also see how many tweets each blog post has earned, and how long ago did each post earn its first tweet.
3. Find the Feed Count
When you are out to evaluate a guest blogging site and see how popular or active a blog is, you can also see the feed count to figure this out. This data is subjective and has to be considered alongside other facts to see how popular a blog truly is. The feed count does give you an idea on how often the blog feed gets checked on and how many subscribers this blog had.
Here is a trick you could use to find out how many subscribers a blog has even if it isn’t displayed on the blog. You can copy the feedburner link of the post that you can from the linked feed button. It is going to something like feeds.feedburner.com/username. Add a prefix –fc/ to the word “username” so it looks like this feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/username. Use this link to get the subscriber count.
You can measure the strength of a blog with these factors and use this data to judge your competition or see how useful a guest post or review on this site would help your authority or SEO rankings.