Comments on: A new metric for blog rankings

By: FreeUrChains

FreeUrChains — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 15:45:43 +0000

I think Videocasts are more impressive for short term popularity than blog text Posts. However, text posts teach better for long term understanding than video posts.

A combination of both will gather more followers for your classroom and help change the world quicker.

By: » The salary of a blogger: What you should be worth Early Retirement Extreme: —because life is too short for a full time job

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 01:50:26 +0000

[...] I just realized that as a blogger, I could do something similar. I use the blog metrics of this post and see that currently, I have an average of 701 visitors per day who spend an average [...]

By: Scott Lovingood

Scott Lovingood — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 03:03:04 +0000

Hey Jacob. I find this discussion very informative along with your normal Early Retirement blogs. I am a fairly new blogger and use statcounter and google analytics and webmaster tools for most of my stats. Statcounter doesn’t do the eyeball time test very well since if they only load one page it counts as 5 secs. Google analytics seems to do a better job.

Eyeball time count 33 minutes/day
2.4 pages per visit
1.3 Comments per post
128% visit increase month over month (Great to be small huh? LOL Gives huge increases at the beginning)

Currently have zero feedburner subscribers but do have 4 Aweber newsletter subscribers

I am going to track these as I go because I think they show a good deal about how the readers interact with your site.

I think I included everything there.

Keep up the good posts. I do think you have plenty to monetize just have to be creative.

By: PC

PC — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 03:24:00 +0000

@ Steven,
To be honest I don’t have the slightest concern about integrity of Jacob and ERE. Anyone reads more than one post or send email to him will know what I mean.

And I do believe to make some dollars (even if you don’t need it), is a way to judge the success of one’s work. That’s why I don’t mind a few ads or even some affiliates.

The other good way to count success/influence beyond dollar is to use traffic as a gauge. The problem of that is that it doesn’t really show authority. If Jacob can convert one person’s lifestyle into ERE, that should be more powerful than getting 10k people reading a credit score post, right?

The purpose of this post, I would guess, is to deal with the aforementioned problem. And I think monetize is still a good tool. (delete me if I’m totally wrong~)

By: Kevin M

Kevin M — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:36:42 +0000

Jacob – about the tax stuff, you know I’m here for questions if you need me. I do have some experience w/CA taxes, but obviously not as much as my home state. And CA is not the most business friendly state with all their fees and strange taxes.

I didn’t realize you’d actually need a permit though, that is interesting. It’s not like you’d be seeing customers for your business or having a lot of vehicle traffic which I assume are the major concern.

Obviously I have no idea how much ad revenue we’re talking about. It would be kinda cool though to donate some or all to your new non-profit venture.

By: Steven

Steven — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:32:33 +0000

PC does has some good ideas there.
One of the great things about your blog however is the lack of advertising.

When you say to go buy a really high end knife/fishing reel/etc.. rather than the cheap crap, and I don’t see where you gain financially from saying that, then I believe you sincerely are in favor of that.

If I were a totally new reader, and you told me how you can retire in 5 years (which is a mind boggling idea for most people to start with), and that the way to do that is to buy expensive items using your affiliate links…well, you can imagine what one might think:)

By: Jacob

Jacob — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 01:55:07 +0000

@PC – it really depends on where you live. I’d need two permits from the city. One to be signed by the park manager. One from the county. Then I’d take those permits to the bank and start reading IRS manuals. It is not difficult per se, just a major hassle. Others may only need to do about half of this if they live in an unincorporated or unzoned area.

By: PC

PC — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 01:48:40 +0000

Jacob,
Is it really that difficult? Try advertise for the knife manufacture you like and get paid in kind. Do that for everything you need/want in every aspect of life. Would that still require tax and accounting?

By: Jacob

Jacob — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 01:31:34 +0000

@PC – I would advertise classics in the affiliate sense. Unfortunately it would seem I would have to do the work myself and come to them. The only ones that come to me are companies associated with desperate credit, i.e. credit cards and worse. Also, I really detest that aspect of blogging. I would absolutely hire someone for 20% of the profit to avoid having to deal with the business side of blogging (DBA, zoning, city, quarterly taxes, accounts, etc.). Of course, this comes with agent risk. What’s to prevent someone from plastering over my blog with the stuff above. Maybe I should just get over it and do it myself. My excuses for not doing it are getting worse and worse.

By: PC

PC — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 01:12:42 +0000

Jacob, with a strong readership, why don’t you monetize? I suggest donate part of the income and set an example for PF blogsphere.

I would first and foremost want to get the information for the classics you mentioned. Don’t use the ads model. Try affiliates for high priced classics.

By: Jacob

Jacob — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:58:19 +0000

@Steven – As far as I understand, sitemeter counts “unique visits”. There is a 30 minute timeout from your last activity. So if you do something like the following
1) 00:00 start reading first page
2) 02:43 start reading second page
3) 04:30 start reading third page then take a break
4) 37:40 start reading fourth page
5) 37:45 start reading fifth page and then log out 10 minutes later.
Then you would be counted twice. Once with a 4:30 minute visit and once with a 5 second visit.

By: Steven

Steven — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:50:35 +0000

I wonder how that ‘eyeball time’ metric would work.
When I came upstairs from my home office this afternoon, I had a tab open to your blog from earlier (either this morning, or maybe yesterday, i’m not sure…)
I clicked on your slogan (or whatever it should be called) to get back to your main page to see what your latest entry was.

Does the reporting system for eyeball time know when I was actually reading your blog, or does it report me as being there for most of the day?

PS: I have in fact spent several hours in a row reading your blog before, I do enjoy going through the old posts:)

By: MoneyEnergy

MoneyEnergy — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:14:53 +0000

I’ll have to take some time to work out my numbers… I’ll see if I can get back to you on that…

By: Jacob

Jacob — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:59:29 +0000

@MoneyEnergy – I don’t think including your own responses in the comments is a bad idea. It shows activity, in fact it could be a separate stat. Unfortunately I no longer have the energy to respond to every comment, but I did in the beginning.

I think you’re right about RSS readers, but I also think it’s fair to only count whatever is pulled on that day.

I lose traffic when I stop updating. In fact I would say there’s a certain momentum to be maintained if you want stats to keep growing. If that momentum goes away it can take months to rebuild. It doesn’t come back instantly if you start posting regularly again because your readers have gotten used to only checking once a week.

By: MoneyEnergy

MoneyEnergy — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:54:16 +0000

I like the comments/subscriber number. Right now my ratio is 8.2 comments per subscriber…. but that also is tricky, because my total # of comments includes ones I’ve made; and because you never really know the most current subscriber # since apparently Feedburner only counts the ones “pulled” – as I understand it, that means that if someone’s not opening up their reader, their subscription won’t count for that day. Is that right?

Either way, I agree… all these stats are messy. On WB’s list I’ve also seen blogs whose traffic keeps going up, yet their “most recent post” never changes. Wouldn’t you lose traffic if you stopped updating your blog? Perhaps they update it in a way that just doesn’t update what gets sent to WB. But don’t know why they’d do that.

By: Jacob

Jacob — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:52:05 +0000

@MoneyEnergy – Yeah, I think you’re right. I remember hearing something about alexa rankings being heavily skewed toward techie blogs because techies are more likely to have the toolbar. So what are your numbers?

By: MoneyEnergy

MoneyEnergy — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:46:46 +0000

Yeah, and besides, Alexa rankings only work based on the # of people using an Alexa toolbar, if I’ve read them correctly. So if you pull in 1000 visits a day but only 300 of those people use an Alexa toolbar, that’s what it’s going to look like. Am I right?