About China blogosphere, travel, and entrepreneurship

Fellow bloggers: how do you measure success with your blog?

Bloggers and metrics: I’ll show my stats if you show me yours.

Some of my most fun meetups in China were with passionate bloggers lik38e Aw Guo Qirui (Awflasher (zh), Ifgogo) and Paul Denlinger (China Vortex). Some of those meetings I would characterize as “I’ll show you mine (stats) if you show me yours.” LOL. Apologize in advance for the self-referential 自恋 (narcissism…or is it 自我自恋?) inherent in this post.
Aw and Lisa were nice enough to pick me up at the Beijing Airport. But first thing Aw did when I got to my hotel was crack open his laptop to compare blog stats! Funny. But this turned out to be a blogger bonding moment. When Aw Guo talked about his focus on RSS subscribers as the ultimate stat I felt I had found a kindred soul. With another Ifgogo blogger Lisa Lee, we then talked about readers, traffic, Google, metrics, GFW, the new generation in China, blood types, Myers-Briggs, fortune telling. Here he is in my overpriced room at the Beijing JWMarriott:

Then the next day I had the same conversation about blog stats with Paul Denlinger! Here’s Paul and I going at it at the executive lounge at the JWMarriott:

Photo courtesy of ChristineLu.com

I later met with Paul and he said: “You really like numbers, don’t you? I can tell from your posts.” He called it. So here I am feeding my metrics obsession with another mega-post. How do you measure success with your blog?

First half of 2008 in review

With the close of the second quarter ended June 30, 2008, I thought I’d take the opportunity to look back at the first half of the year and measure some of our progress with CN Reviews. In summary, I’ve been pleased by our progress, but also feel like we need to restructure our blog and our focus to get better success in the future.

One of my favorite posts of all time on blog metrics is from Avinash Kaushik of Occam’s Razor. He met with us in Palo Alto and gave us some great blogging tips (like focus on RSS subscribers). I have followed his six recommendations closely to evaluate our own progress on CN Reviews.

Framework: Six Recommendations for Measuring Blog Success from Avinash Kaushik.

Here’s what Avinash recommends based on your “blog persona”:

CN Reviews is a “business blog” in Avinash’s framework. Below, I have followed his suggestions #1 through #4 and added a #5 which I call “Search Engine Optimization”.

Summary of my self-assessment of CN Reviews

• Raw Author Contribution - We have done a great job since our start on Dec 25, 2007, with 153 posts or 24 posts per month. The team, with David Feng being the #1 poster, has maintained a steady stream of posts for our readers. However, our posts are too long (including this one) and our writing is not accessible enough for non-native English speakers. Post length of 998 words/post needs to go down!
• Audience Growth - We are pleased with our audience growth, with June traffic of 12k visits and May traffic of 31k visits. We created a duplicate content situation which caused Google to start suppressing us in late May and June so we are recovering from that. Because we are a niche blog, we are also focused on quality of audience rather than quantity. So I don’t care so much about overall traffic. However, I do care about RSS subscribers and we have failed to build RSS subscribers at the rate we would like. So we need to focus our coverage and theme the blog more strongly to encourage more people.
• Conversion Rate - I’m pleased with the participation from the blog, with 2.5 comments/trackbacks per post on average.
• Citations/Ripple Index - Right now, our Technorati Rank is 51,951, and our Technorati Authority is 164. Our TA was 2 in January 2008.
• Search Engine Optimization - We are doing a good job with Search Engine Optimization. Google Page Rank = 4. Google Pages Indexed = 286. Yahoo Link Domain 2 = 16,878

And now on to the details…

#1 - Raw Author Contribution

Raw Author Contribution =

(A) Number of Posts / Number of Months Blogging
(B) Number of Words in Post / Number of Posts

I installed the General Stats plugin to measure these stats (on 7/4/2008):

CNReviews Raw Author Contribution is:

(A) 153 posts / 6.33 months (since 12/25/07) = 24
(B) 152,840 words in post / 153 Posts = 998

On average, 24 posts per month and 998 words per post. The frequency has been great, but long posts are not good for non-native speakers of English.

#2 - Holistic Audience Growth

Following Avinash’s methodology, we looked at our first measure of audience growth: Onsite Audience growth.

In June we had 12,082 visits, vs. 31,131 visits in May.

Our May traffic included a large spike due to the May 12 Sichuan earthquake, and then a drop in June due to a duplicate content problem on our site that caused us to be suppressed in Google and seriously damaged our Google traffic.

Here are some comments the Google suppression that we saw:

• May - We had a huge spike of traffic immediately after the China earthquake. May 16, was our peak day, with 4,641 unique visitors that day. But by 5/30, we noticed that we seemed to be suppressed in Google (for example, we couldn’t rank even on keyword query matching our post titles) and we were down to 497 unique visitors on 5/30.

• June - By 6/12, Min found the reason why. Thanks to a bad WordPress plugin, WordPress Contact Form 7, we had duplicate content for almost all of our pages. We found 495 pages in Google with this query: site:cnreviews.com “?wpcf7″. But our total indexed pages in Google was less than 900. We ended the month with 10,394 absolute unique visitors and 12,082 visits.

The second measure of audience growth is our “Offsite” Audience Growth or Feedburner and Feedsky (since Feedburner is blocked in China) subscribers.

We currently have 93 subscribers via Feedburner:

We also have on average 24.4 subscribers via Feedsky:

#3 - Conversion Rate

As Avinash says, blogs are a conversation. And comments are a reflection of how many people want to get into the conversation.

Conversion Rate =

Number of Visitor Comments / Number of Posts

To date, we have 546 total comments and trackbacks. However, many of those comments and trackbacks are our own:

• Self-trackbacks = 11% , or 61

• Self-comments = 19% , or 102

• So visitor comments and trackbacks = 70% of total reported comments, or 382

So our conversion rate is 382 / 153 = 2.5 comments/post

#4 Citations / Ripple Index

How broad is your impact across the blogosphere? Avinash recommends measuring “citations,” or how much people refer to your blog.

Citations / Ripple Index =

(A) Technorati Rank
(B) Technorati Authority

Right now, our Technorati Rank is 51,951, and our Technorati Authority is 164.

#5 Search Engine Optimization

From 1/1/2008 - 6/30/2008, we received 66% of our traffic from Search Engines.

Search Engine friendliness is a key factor for getting high quality blog traffic. We look at the following measures.

Search Engine Optimization =

(A) Google Page Rank
(B) Google Pages Indexed
(C) Yahoo! Link Domain (LD2)

Using a Firefox greasemonkey tool called SEOQuake, we can capture the following measures:

• Google Page Rank = 4

• Google Pages Indexed = 286

• Yahoo Link Domain 2 = 16,878

In summary, I’m pleased with the first six months of CN Reviews. Its a great start. But I would characterize it as a group of passionate people that have written on a number of interesting topics. But this group of people have not yet brought it together into a consistent, easy to understand concept that can get lots of RSS subscribers. That is what I’ll be working on with the CN Reviews blogging team to develop over the next few months. Stay tuned!