Should You Sacrifice Top Placing In Blog Awards?
A key metric typically used to measure blog popularity is the number of bloglines subscribers or feedburner subscribers. These measures give an idea of the number of subscribers you have to your RSS feed.
In theory, this represents your “subscriber core” and indicates how ‘sticky’ your content is.
You might think this blog fares abysmally, according to Text Link Ads “Blog Juice” calculator. 
A 5.4 out of a supposed 10 ranking?
Let’s look at the components of the score:
- Bloglines: the number of Bloglines subscribers (accounts for 40% of score)
- Alexa: ranking determines 15%
- Technorati: 30%
- Links: Inbound links 15% (determined fromTechnorati).
From the example above, the low number of bloglines subscribers (32) has hit my rankings hard.
De-emphasizing bloglines subscribers and feedburner subscribers (also a set of RSS subscribers) would be detrimental to your rankings.
Why would anyone want to do this?
In that case, why would a blogger deliberately aim for low RSS subscriber numbers?
Simple. Three reasons.
- Control
- Relationship building
- Branding
Instead of building feedburner/bloglines RSS readership, I’ve built a traditional list.
- Control
Unlike indirect communication with my readers via a RSS feed, I can communicate directly with them via the opt-in list services provided by aweber or getresponse.
This gives me the opportunity to determine how often I communicate with my list and how I do so. I’m not merely restricted to just blog posts.
- Relationship Building
Having a list and control over the emails gives me flexibility in building the relationship gradually.
I can queue a variety of welcome posts, and staggered communication which can ease a new subscriber into the flow of things.
- Branding
I can customize branded posts, personalized to the list members, and have highly targeted and relevant offers sent to the members.
I believe an opt-in list brands you more effectively, compared to a RSS publishing service.
So it’s true that you give up the blog popularity ‘point score’ based on the number of perceived subscribers, but the intangible benefits you’ll gain are unparalled.
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Resources:
List Building Autoresponders-
- Aweber
- GetResponse
- Text Link Ads (Good for building link popularity, $100 free credit)
Walter
May 1, 2007 at 8:12 am (17 years ago)I feel that as the number of blogs you subscribe to increase, you will end up reading less and less of them. This then reduces the impact of each blog. It all boils down to the clutter factor and information overload. I guess this is where your point about opt-in versus RSS comes to play too.
Wendy Piersall
May 10, 2007 at 8:12 am (17 years ago)How funny that they would weight RSS subscribers so heavily – which usually means more people are reading the blog content in their readers and not on the site – WHERE THEIR TEXT LINK ADS ARE LOCATED! I’ve never sold a Feedvertising ad, either… very strange logic. 😉
Andrew Wee
May 10, 2007 at 8:57 am (17 years ago)Hi Wendy,
It’s a measure of syndication and distribution value which is value, although it doesn’t factor in list size which is more important in my opinion, especially with the ability to follow up, engage and build your community.
There is a confidentiality element with list size, so understandably, the public metrics are the next best thing.