Wednesday, May 23, 2007

The Viral Garden's Top 25 Marketing Blogs - Week 57

Here's the standings for Week 57:

1 - Seth's Blog - 6,848 (-124)(LW - 1)
2 - Creating Passionate Users - 14,068 (-482)(LW - 2)
3 - Duct Tape Marketing - 25,604 (-721)(LW - 3)
4 - Gaping Void - 27,426 (+297)(LW - 4)
5 - Drew's Marketing Minute - 63,424 (+168)(LW - 6)
6 - Marketing Shift - 64,601 (-4,331)(LW - 5)
7 - Daily Fix - 64,860 (+130)(LW - 7)
8 - Influential Interactive Marketing - 72,279 (-1,183) (LW - 8)
9 - New School of Network Marketing - 85,790 (-1,130)(LW - 10)
10 - The Viral Garden - 89,627 (-1,854)(LW - 11)
11 - Logic + Emotion - 91,063 (-2,316)(LW - 12)
12 - Converstations - 91,338 (-7,021)(LW - 9)
13 - Marketing Hipster - 95,201 (-1,031) (LW - 13)
14 - Coolzor - 97,287 (+423)(LW - 14)
15 - Brand Autopsy - 133,601 (-2,167)(LW - 15)
16 - What's Next - 146,183 (-2,603)(LW - 16)
17 - Jaffe Juice - 153,703 (+1,225)(LW - 17)
18 - Marketing Headhunter - 169,943 (-940)(LW - 18)
19 - CK's Blog - 186,691 (+5,149)(LW - 19)
20 - Conversation Agent - 196,776 (+11,371)(LW - 23)
21 - Diva Marketing - 199,666 (-5,910)(LW - 20)
22 - Marketing Nirvana - 202,102 (-3,820)(LW - 21)
23 - Servant of Chaos - 220,194 (-10,957)(LW - 24)
24 - Church of the Customer - 221,254 (-17,721)(LW - 22)
25 - Experience Curve - 232,879 (-20,085)(LW - 25)


More of the same, as 18 of the Top 25 were down. There were some bright spots, as Drew's Marketing Minute enters the Top 5 for the first time, and CK's Blog and Conversation Agent have nice moves upward.

I'm probably going to switch to Technorati to rank the Top 25 starting next week. One of the main reasons why I chose Alexa to rank the blogs was because I assumed that most bloggers understood how Alexa calculates its rankings. Instead, many bloggers had never heard of Alexa! On the flipside, everyone knows about Technorati, and how they rank blogs. So I think switching to Technorati will make the Top 25 much easier to understand. We'll see how it goes.





Next update is next Wednesday.


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22 comments:

Kim Klaver said...

Hi Mack--

I know zip about how technorati ranks blogs, but I bet your blog will do better than with Alexa, since you have lots of people who traded faves, and that seems to be a big deal - the linking blogs and favorites thing.

I suspect my blog won't make it in the top 25 for Technorati at all, but I've enjoyed being in the top 10 with the Alexa rankings for this past year.

Thanks!

:)

Mack Collier said...

Kim the faves don't factor in to Technorati, it's just based on how many blogs have linked to yours. Just by eyeballing it, I would guess The Viral Garden would fall to about 13th or 14th in the Top 25 with Technorati. But it would be much easier to understand, IMO, since higher number is better with Technorati, whereas lower number is better with Alexa. I think that still confuses many people.

But I'm also seeing more and more blogs that Alexa doesn't appear to be tracking accurately. Some bloggers have their traffic stats on their blog, and it's easy to see if Alexa picks up traffic spikes, and I'm seeing several cases where Alexa isn't catching the jumps.

Kim Klaver said...

Thanks for the response. I'm glad you have so many friendly blogs in marketing linking to yours. That is a good thing.

In my marketing area (network marketing), there are like 5 blogs and except for one other besides mine, they rank 400k or lower down. Sigh. Most of my readers have no blogs. I wish they did.

Still, twas fun to be part of this with you, and thanks again. I'll check back for sure.

Did you ever find that dream job?

Unknown said...

Hi Mack - I think the switch will result in a VERY different top 25, not that that's bad but it is different.
As it stands (even with Alexa's imperfections - I've noticed tracking issues on my blog too) your top 25 measures a blog's ability to attract consistent site traffic (readership, albeit an incomplete look at readership since it misses the feed readers). With a switch to Technorati, the top 25 will report the blogs most popular with other bloggers. Either way, I'm sure the list will highlight the work of 25 great bloggers. Interested in seeing how the list looks next week.

Mack Collier said...

Truth be told, I'm sure that most blogs get most of their traffic from other bloggers anyway. It seems that about half mine comes from Google referrals, and the other half from other bloggers.

Of course Alexa also only tracks users that have installed the Alexa toolbar, so that's an issue as well.

We'll see. One downside is that it will take me even longer to get the list out with Technorati, at least at first. It now takes almost 2 hours a week with Alexa.

Anonymous said...

Mack,

As always -- thanks for making the time to do the weekly list.

It seems to me that why you do this in the first place should be part of how you secure the rankings.

What's your goal? When you say top marketing blogs -- how (without thinking of the tools you'd use to get the data) do you define "top?"

Or better yet...how does the audience for which you do the rankings define it?

Why not ask your readers how they'd like to see you evaluate marketing blogs. Is it longevity and links? Is it current traffic? Is it something else?

No one consistently teaches/reminds us about engaging/listening to our community more than you. So why not let this be a learning lab -- you be the professor and let us play in the lab!

However you decide to do it -- you add value. That's why you're in my blogroll and why I read every post you write. Thanks for being such a great example for all the marketing blogs!

Drew

Anonymous said...

Yay! Another week on The Viral Garden. This place is so nice, the sun is shining, and there are lots of smart people. I feel at home.

Alas, my Technorati is even more slip than my Alexa so while cumulatively Conversation Agent reaches 623 permanent inbound links, the split hurts it.

Kim Klaver said...

Hi Mack:

Interesting comment: "Truth be told, I'm sure that most blogs get most of their traffic from other bloggers anyway."

I must be living in another world. I never even thought of that. My readers are just regular people who want to learn how to do direct marketing and that's my gig. I get a few company types, of course, but I would guess that less than 10% of my readers come from other blogs.

Looking at my daily reading referral numbers confirms that. The traffic is nearly all from mail services, not other blogs.

Interesting, for sure. And if you are right, which I'm sure you are for your blog, all the genuine link love you've been doing among your top 25 will be good for all those rankings.

I'd think marketing students would be readers too, if they knew about these blogs. Limiting readership to other blog writers seems to be missing a lot of potential people you could influence in the real world too.

Think?

Kim Klaver said...

Mack and Drew:

Last question about this, promise-

Who is your intended audience then with your blogs? Other marketing bloggers? Corporate America?

Who are you trying to influence?

My focus is the millions of people are are learning how to do direct sales and network marketing, and the companies who market in that way.

Just wondering who your intended audience is, and who you're trying to influence - is it primarily other marketing bloggers?

That's cool, I just wondered, based on your comment that your ranking is based on links from other marketing bloggers.

In which case I totally don't belong on the new list, and I won't feel so bad.

Kim

Mack Collier said...

Point taken Kim, maybe my stats are the ones that are unusual.

Actually if I were wanting to use the Top 25 to put The Viral Garden in the best light, I would keep things the way they are, since Alexa seems to track my traffic almost perfectly, and has me as a Top 10 blog. By switching to Technorati, I can tell already that Converstations, Logic + Emotion, and probably Jaffe Juice will all jump me. Maybe Brand Autopsy as well. So TVG will likely drop a few notches from switching to Technorati.

This is something I've been thinking about for a while, as more and more readers are emailing me to either tell me that they don't understand how Alexa works, or to point out how Alexa isn't accurately tracking their traffic. Or both. I'm sure as far as the Top 25 bloggers are concerned, most would rather go with the system that ranks their particular blog higher, and that's completely understandable. But from my point of view, if I pick the system that my readers are telling me that they don't understand and that isn't working for them, even if it makes my blog 'look' better, that doesn't really help me since it doesn't serve the readers.

Mack Collier said...

Kim I always saw the Top 25 as a resource for those that are just discovering blogs. Most people that are new to blogging quickly find out about Seth, Gaping Void, Creating Passionate Users, but there's plenty of other great marketing blogs out there that I didn't feel were getting their due. So I wanted to create a list to track the blogs using a metric such as Alexa, to show that there were many great marketing blogs out there that someone new to this space, might overlook. This is also why I wanted to start The Z-List, because I wanted to see what I felt were 'deserving' blogs get some extra exposure.

I've always said that there are far too many wonderful and diverse blogging voices out there to reserve ourselves to just listening to the A-Listers. Hopefully the Top 25 list helps shine the light on some of the other many great marketing blogs out there.

Chris Brown said...

Mack:
It will be interesting to see the differences between the way Technorati tracks and Alexa Tracks.

Would you consider a couple of weeks where you do both so the readers could compare?

I check out Alexa quite a bit, but usually have issues with how they are tracking both my website & my blog. Some days I've seen them post zero, even when the website is up and going strong.

With the recent changes in Technorati, it seems like they will be gaining momentum too.

What do you think of Todd And's calculations by including the number of Bloglines subscribers into the mix of marketing/PR blogs?

Chris

PS. thanks for doing your blog - I learn something new everytime I come to your site.

merjoem32 said...

Thanks for the info. I'm not an expert on Internet marketing so I can appreciate this post about the best marketing blogs. I hope I can learn a lot from these excellent blogs.

Harry Joiner said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Mack Collier said...

Chris I don't even want to think about doing a list with BOTH Alexa and Technorati at once, I'm guessing that would be about a 3-hour chore! We'll try it with Technorati and see how it goes. If everyone hates it, I can always switch back to Alexa.

Anonymous said...

" I always saw the Top 25 as a resource for those that are just discovering blogs."

Regardless of how you choose to track the blogs Mack, this is the true value you provide to readers. It's actually a service. And as I've said before publically--we are in the service industry.

Thanks for sacrificing several hours a week to do this. It's appreciated and was very helpful to me in my early days of figuring all this stuff out.

Anonymous said...

One really nifty thing about changing to Technorati is all the new blogs that will be discovered (by VG readers). I guess you'll have to go scouring the net for new candidates.

For example, Andy Nulman's Pow! Right Between the Eyes has a Technorati Authority of 522, just ahead of CK (516). Lewis Green may pop through with 493. And Valeria is at 449. But my money is on Valeria because I don't believe she was on the Z-List (like everyone else) which means that she has staying power into August when everyone else will lose numbers!

It'll be fun to watch and handicap.

Roger von Oech, 518
(of Creative Think, not a marketing blog, but a sometime observer of marketing blogs, and a big proponent of subscribers!)

Anonymous said...

Hi Mack

I run a top 100 list (for Aussie bloggers) on my site. I'm not sure if it's an issue in your community, but I found that using Technorati alone favoured blogs that were savvy in getting links (and some were on blogroll exchanges with over 400 others).

Of course, Alexa's not perfect either. I now use a combination of the two (in my case I also weight traffic from Australia). A kind Aussie blogger wrote a script for me that automated the process which takes a lot of the "grunt work" out of it - but I wouldn't have a clue how he did it. Maybe there's someone who could help you automate it?

Anonymous said...

Kim,

My audience is marketing & branding professionals (bloggers or not), small business owners/managers who have been handed marketing & branding responsibilities without any training or help, and other creative types.

But mostly my blog is about helping people be smarter marketers -- whatever their job title is.

After all, everybody is in marketing whether they want to be or not.

Many of my readers are also subscribers to my agency's weekly marketing e-newsletter or other non-blogging sources.

Hope that helps.

Drew

Toby said...

Mack - Ditto. The 'garden club's' top 25 is a great resource. T-rati will certainly change the mix a bit. One look out for .. with Typepad blogs it's not uncommon to have more than one URL that T-rati is tracking.

Futurelab said...

I've stopped looking at Alexa rankings a long time ago, as there seems to be no realtionship to reality. About a year ago we came in at app. 50.000, which at the time seemed unnaturally high. Since then our readership has grown about tenfold - and we are at the same Alexa level!
The only real key-measurement for us is how many feedreaders we have according to Feedburner, as that indicates people that are really interested and didnt just pop by based on a random Google-search. And that number is almost 10 times higher on a daily base then the site-visitors.
A nice try (but still imperfect) to overcome this problem is the Power 150 by Todd Andrlik, who combines several different types of rankings.

Dragan Varagic said...

According to your list, my blog www.draganvaragic.com/blog/ about interactive marketing and PR is at the 15th place.

I think that may consider to use TLA Blog Juice Calculator, which comines Alexa, Bloglines and Technorati, and it is more relevant then Alexa alone. You can beleive me, because I promote Alexa ranking service for Serbia in last nine years!

You may also try compete.com (it is added to SearchStatus plugin for Firefox) and netcraft.com.