In a couple of conversations at last night's Third Tuesday event, I mentioned that I'd been playing around with a tool from online marketing specialists Marketleap. If you want a quick and dirty way to demonstrate the power of blogging, their Link Popularity Check is a neat little tool. I'll let them describe what it does:

Link popularity check is one of the best ways to quantifiably and independently measure your website's online awareness and overall visibility. Simply put, link popularity refers to the total number of links or "votes" that a search engine has found for your website.

Marketleap has designed this link popularity tool to help website owners find out who is linking to their site, but also to give a useful benchmarking report to quickly show where you stand in comparison to competitors and other major online players.

The groovy thing about this widget is the way it lets you run comparison rankings for a handful of different sites, and benchmark the results against a cross-section of sites in the same general industry sector.

I was, I'll confess, a bit puffed-up and smug last night about the seconds of fun I've been having with this thing - comparing link popularity for my blog against the main websites of a few of my erstwhile employers. Marketleap ranks sites into a number of categories, based on the amount of Googlejuice (and other search engine links) each site has. Here's the tier system they use:

This here blog of mine shows up at the "Contender" level. It would be even more churlish and self-satisfied of me to point out specifically who I was comparing myself with, but three of my former employers' sites scarcely manage to creep into the "Average Presence" tier.OK, I know this is a pretty narrow and unsophisticated view of online effectiveness, but the point is (FWIW) the companies with which I've been comparing my stats are, one would think, far more interested in such things as web traffic, "awareness and overall visibility" than I need to be.

Yet simply as a function of running this blog for five straight years - and thanks to the very nature of the way in which blogs work - means that I score a higher "link popularity" rank than the three sizeable public companies I chose for my test report.

Markets are conversations. Blogs create good conversations. Ergo: blogging is good for online marketers.

Try it yourself. Next time you're asked in to explain to BigCo bosses why they really ought to be blogging - run some comparative reports for them. Try pitting Scoble against the main Microsoft site, or Schwartz against Sun, Bob Lutz vs. GM. The individual bloggers may not always beat their current or former employers, but they all give them a good run for the money.

Tags: thirdtuesday, marketleap, googlejuice

Powered by Qumana

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 27, 2006.
You are viewing an individual post from Michael O'Connor Clarke's Uninstalled blog.
Click through for full archives, bio, RSS feed, etc.