• Daily Visits
• Unique page views
• Promotion of a link by Twitter Delicious & Facebook (currently)
• The traffic you send by a specific channel

One True Fan Toolbar

The main interface for One True Fan currently is the toolbar.

Here you can see the toolbar on my screen just as I have become One True Fan of Techmeme – actually quite a hard challenge because Techmeme isn’t really a site with 100s of pages that you might normally browse.

You can gain more points by linking there, which I assume Louis has done a few times over the last couple of weeks as well as daily visits. I did manage to catch up though it is not something I could normally maintain as I don’t use Twitter.

The toolbar can get a little annoying – quite often I have forgotten to switch it off when taking screenshots, and for hardcore SEOs access to footer links can be impaired. Having to hide the toolbar on every page view when doing some work can be a pain, plus at times you are looking at lots of client sites which you might want to not permanently block, but turn off temporarily.
During the last month of alpha testing I even uninstalled the toolbar for a whole week due to these problems, and I know a few others have done the same. It is something that will hopefully be fixed soon.

One True Fan Profiles

The profiles provide a nice record of where you have been, which sites you have “captured” and which have fallen to your enemies or friends.

You can see I have been having a few small battles over various sites… well at least that is what some normal useage patterns can look like – I suppose if I was really “invested” in one of these sites then that would matter.

Being the One True Fan of Google will no doubt make a few readers LOL.

MyBlogLog Roots Empowering Marketers

3 years ago I explained why social media marketing sucks. I realise that monitoring of social media has improved a lot in the enterprise space over that time.

The team behind One True Fan are the original team members of MyBlogLog – all of them as far as I can tell. They have been off doing their own things for a few years. Eric was a co-founder of Gnip which is still doing well, but they are back to take another bite at the cherry.

MyBlogLog started off life as a tracking application – Eric wanted to see which links were popular on his blog. The widget came later as did the social graph, the collation of data etc.

I don’t think they have any plans with One True Fan to tackle content in quite the same way, though the questions I have asked have admitedly been focused on marketing features. I am a marketing geek after all.

Those still at Yahoo… please forgive me… I am going to refer to MyBlogLog in the past tense. There isn’t an indication what Yahoo will do with MyBlogLog.

One of the unique features of MyBlogLog was the ability of the widget to tell a site owner who was visiting. I am not referring to just looking at a widget, or an expanded list of the last 127 visitors that people played around with.

You could grab their user id as a javascript variable, and then use that to mine their social graph – only recently I discovered a WordPress plugin that works with that feature for some data mining, though it was a little bugged.

Big things are made about how Facebook is now expanding their special partnerships with a few sites to provide them with data about visitors before they have even logged in. MyBlogLog could do this 3 years ago, linked with lots of social graph information if a visitor included that on their profiles – you would also get a list of all their favorite blogs, and those in most cases were automatically added to after 5 or 10 visits.

You could also use the data to see what individuals were doing on your site, in some ways like expensive CRM systems such as Infusionsoft can tag people.
My friend Rob had a cool little tracking script that would log all the visitors to each page, so you could determine who were your biggest fans – I tested it for a little while. One day I was shocked to see one new visitor… a human not a bot read 52 pages of my blog in a single very long session – I think it was a Saturday and he just hung out reading.

You could also use the data to do all kinds of dynamic content targeting and data mining. In many ways Facebook are late to the game.

The problem is to actually use the MyBlogLog data there are some… issues

• You needed to be able to program and the API access had to be applied for on a per domain basis – not mass market.
• There were privacy concerns – if you started visibly profiling people and giving them rewards based on visits, and lots of people started doing it, there would have been a stink – this was the aftermath of the Facebook Beacon problems.

Tying similar technology into a toolbar of some kind makes sense because it is then installed specifically because people want their movement’s tracked to become the “One True Fan” or earn other rewards.

One True Fan Rewards

Things are a little vague on the rewards side – I have questioned Eric Marcoullier quite extensively about what will be possible, but you could really liken it more to a brain storming session than Eric explaining planned features.
There will be a way of delivering some kind of rewards – what criteria, how the delivery works etc we will have to leave for another day until things are a little more finalized. Things like coupon delivery in some way are a given, so are custom badges/patches.

Possible criteria:-

• Number of referrals (by some 2 way API integration or goals)
• Driving traffic
• Visiting certain pages
• Attaining a certain number of points
• Being One True Fan
• Visiting a certain number of times
• Visiting a certain number of consecutive days

A social media tell-a-friend rewards system on steroids.

Widgets

Apparently there is meant to be some widgets coming – I have no idea whether these might work with other platforms such as Facebook as an alternative for identity, but they are comimng all the same.

One True Fan Analytics Dashboard

One thing immediately “missing” is any kind of analytics, even as a toolbar user. If you are looking for click stats for links you share you are going to be disappointed for a while. You can get some idea from the number of points you gain.

Competitors

Badgeville – also launched at Techcrunch Disrupt – seems to be a white label solution for each brand site – mybe I am biased but I think it is the wrong solution for 99.9% of websites. They are a “solutions” provider for large sites, which means I am sure they are also charging a lot of money for implementation.

Chirrps – this seems like Entrecard 2.0 – despite having launched it is nowhere near the same level of sophistication.

Comment Luv – it might seem strange, but any incentive to visit other blogs, even if it is a just the ability to leave a comment is competition – in some ways even being a dofollow blog is an incentive as well – they have a referral program so I used a referral link.

Contest Burner – currently off the market but it is a WordPress plugin to run your own incentivized contests, rewarding things like tweets, comments, email subscriptions etc.

I don’t look on MyBlogLog or Blogcatalog to be competitors, as there isn’t really any competition for attention. One True Fan you gain points for visiting websites and promoting them which is complementary to other blogging and social media activities.

More details on Techcrunch, Louis Gray and Techmeme

For me it isn’t the game that excites me but the ability to identify those fans that are not immediately obvious.

I would be lying if I didn’t also appreciate the enhanced viral (incentivised) distribution of content.

Note: It is and Alpha version – for me, Beta starts around 90% feature complete for what should be there at public launch. Development is gong at an extremely rapid pace. Techcrunch reports $1.2M in the coffers but it was obvious there was going to be some significant investment with the number of early stage investors playing for the last few weeks.

I did a little test signup yesterday with a spare email account and received an email to signup within a few hours so signing up is worth doing – they are not going to keep you waiting forever.

Comparisons are bound to be made with the many free tools available from SEOmoz and SEObook, some of which are purely online services, and others are browser plugins. Many of the SEOmoz tools also require registration, and some are under the hood of their paid membership, especially tools which provide long term analysis of both your own site, and that of competitors.

How Far Will Stompernet Move The Free Line with Stomper Site Seer?

Brad Fallon and Andy Jenkins are among the most astute marketers I have ever come into contact with. They want your email address, they are going to use it for marketing their products and select partners, and they are going to a lot of effort to get you to give them permission to do so.

My hope is that they will continue development of Site Seer to make it more useful, and thus retain as many referrals as possible. I am a Stompernet affiliate, by referring my readers to them I want them to provide incredible value even in their free material.

So far Stompernet Site Seer shows promise, but is certainly not without its flaws

So on with this review…

White on Green

The reports are quite small white text on a green background. Whilst my eyes aren’t perfect, I have never needed glasses, but I found the current design hard to scan & tiring on the eyes.
The easy solution was to switch off CSS using the web developer toolbar.

With or without the CSS I found it hard to determine what each section was really about.

One Page

When you setup a report, you provide a domain, plus a number of keywords.

My home page isn’t really intended to rank for anything highly competitive, in fact this whole blog ranks well in both the main Google search results and blog search whilst doing almost every factor other than page titles totally wrong.

Just an immediate example are current results for Site Seer.

I gain quality links on a regular basis, and ensure juice flows to the parts of my site that need it, but so far I am not optimizing this site extensively in a traditional manner.

Thus I provided just a few keywords, and expected Site Seer to do the following:-

• Scrape each search engine for current rankings for each keyword
• Scrape top ranking pages for each keyword
• Compare various on page and off page factors of my pages compared to competitors
• Monitor various ranking factors of my site over time, and that of my competitors

Unfortunately Stompernet Site Seer isn’t currently as sophisticated as I had hoped. When I entered andybeard.eu as my domain, and a few keywords, my home page was analysed based upon purely my home page.

Presence On Various Sites

The first section of site analysis are various links to perform site searches. Fairly basic stuff. As well as various search engines, there are also links for various other useful sites such as PRWeb and Ezine Articles.

There is actually a bug in some of these links. WWW is being prepended on any domain, thus whilst search engines can cope with that to a greater or lesser degree, it doesn’t work at all for PRWeb and EzineArticles if you decided to make your canonical URLs without www.
It is actually interesting that for some reason Google is no longer treating www.andybeard.eu and andybeard.eu the same for site searches. The site:www.andybeard.eu command comes up with no results. This might be a by product of them switching site searches to use Google custom search, but I had though that was only when you use Adsense for search.

This section also has 8 free videos – I must admit I haven’t watched them all yet.

On Page SEO Analysis

The first section is a site analysis using Google’s Adword’s API

This is an interesting and sometimes surprising report for many site owners. We analyze your page through the Google API and determine what “topics / silos” Google thinks your site is about.

The results from the API are effectively the same as can be obtained manually using the Google Adwords External Keyword Tool

It is actually very useful, for landing page keyword research, as you can see in this video from Ryan Deiss a couple of months ago.

Google Sneak attack

How valuable is this for SEO?

The important thing to remember is this is not really related to siloing. The Adwords tool gives you keywords related to the page, or if you so instruct, also including related words to the pages linked from a page.
It is more useful in competitive analysis – this information will allow you to quickly spot which keyword terms they are aiming for, and which ones they should be aiming for

If you want to be really sneaky, and they have an affiliate program which you can track at keyword level, try joining their affiliate program and throw some traffic at various landing pages on your competitors site to test various keywords they are using before you even build your own.

Unfortunately what this doesn’t really do is give you “topics / silos Google thinks your site is about”

Why?

First of all, for on page it is only dealing with a single page, or at best a page, plus pages linked from that page – that doesn’t cover your whole site. When I point Site Seer at my home page, it doesn’t come back to say my site is about lifestreaming, blog widgets, Mybloglog, Blogcatalog etc, but most of my readers are aware that I cover those topics, and it is more than the occasional mention.

This might be due to bugs currently in the Adwords keyword tool. On Friday night / Saturday morning there was an Adwords tool update of some kind. The results from Site Seer that I obtained were quite strange…

Those are the top level groupings, with other keywords displayed as…

Secondly, the tool cannot take into consideration topical authority based on external SEO factors - whilst you can claim your content to be on a certain topic, for Google it is important to take into account the “status” your site holds within both your area of topical authority, and references from sites of high authority of more general importance.

Thirdly, there is internal linking – this can add as much or more weight to a page than links from external sources, especially for pages that tend to be more sales related, and less likely to generate natural linkage. On product specific promotions within the internet marketing niche, I can rank highly without any SEO effort – no link building required, because of built up authority, and the power of internal linking. Sometimes I even get quite notable links for which I am very greatful for, though because of the short term nature of many promotions, the link equity is more useful for future promotions.

Lastly, the Google Adwords API will return results for a page even if it hasn’t been indexed. To prove this point I grabbed the start of this article, pasted it into an HTML page, even without any meta data, and pointed the Adwords Keyword tool at the page – it returned tons of related, albeit generic keywords.
It didn’t return product specific terms such as Stompernet. Want to see for yourself? Here is the page (nofollowed)

Thus whilst I am sure the Stompernet guys are aware of this, after all people using PPC can get great quality scores on totally new domains which haven’t even been indexed, the description is a little ambiguous.

Meta Analysis

I have nothing really to object to regarding the meta tag analysis – they provide a good deal of instructional information.
They did forget to mention blocking DMOZ descriptions

I am currently a little bit of a maverick regarding meta descriptions. I have used them on this site in the past, but there is a major problem. Some of my more popular posts have so many trackbacks on the permalinks, that invariably even when I used a unique meta description, Google in its wisdom used part of a trackback. They did that even when half the trackback was in Chinese. The reason is that trackbacks often have the title of the link to post in them. Thus at the end of each page is always a fairly high occurrence of whatever I included as the title of my article, and Google seem to pick that content up no matter what I do to try to correct it.

Stomper Analysis of your Meta Keywords
# Your site has no description. Indicated to have one!
# You have included too many Meta Keywords
This page has 107 meta keywords.
# Your Meta Description is too short.
It is 0 characters, it is suggested to expand it to at least 150 characters.

Stomper Analysis of your Meta Keywords Continued…
Meta Keywords: Of the keywords that you entered, here is a list of what is included / missing:

1. wordpress seo INCLUDED in meta keywords.
2. niche marketing NOT INCLUDED
3. linking structure NOT INCLUDED
4. pagerank update NOT INCLUDED
5. seo siloing NOT INCLUDED

I am obviously a failure… but other than the niche marketing keyword the pages ranking for the terms generally have the term in the meta keywords. It is just they have applied my home page to all.

Currently I just have a load of tags being added automatically depending on what is on my front page. As and when I switch to a more formal front page, I will probably change that and keep it to core categories.

Headings Analysis & Image Alt Text

They spot what h1 h2 and h3 headings you use, and which images are missing alt text. It seems to work.

Sitemaps

Apparently they check to see if you have a sitemap. Here is my sitemap which they found. The observant among you will notice from the headers being sent that that page returns a 404 not found.

This feature currently gets a 0/5 as it is clearly broken.

The Off-page Value Report

This is mainly quite basic stuff, pulling numbers from Google and Yahoo site explorer. Of note is that my number of indexed pages has been jumping around quite a bit in recent days, maybe they are picking up more tag pages again.

Yahoo seem to be reporting a lot more backlinks than they have in the past.

The tool found me in DMOZ, not in Yahoo (no I am not paying $300 for a link I don’t need from a dubious reviewer) and Alexa well bleh…

Social Media

The social media results rely on APIs, and it is possible they haven’t included error checking

No returns from Technorati or Delicious – this is most clearly a blog and I do have a reasonable listing in Technorati, and a few people have bookmarked various pages on Delicious.

Note: if you fancy bookmarking a few of my posts, this one on WordPress SEO is worthwhile, and people are still making these linking gotchas, and linking mistakes.

Keywords

The keyword analysis is of course quite telling. I rank for all kinds of things that people are not searching for, including the keywords I entered into Stompernet Site Seer.

SEO Myths

The reports finish off with 10 common SEO myths which many will find valuable, though they weren’t presented very clearly

Stomper Site Seer – Long Term Potential

When one of my competitors jumps ahead of me in the SERPs, wouldn’t it be great to know it was because of a number of new links they received, or because they changed something in their site structure.

I don’t want this on just one page, I want it on multiple pages, though a few good landing pages to start

How feasible this level of monitoring is in practice is another thing

• On page not too hard
• Position in the SERPs again not too hard
• Incoming links – very hard to do with any reliability
• Internal linking structure – possibly hard depending on site – every time I use the SEO tag more than 100 internal links change.

The guys at Stompernet have the financial resources and the geeks to do this kind of thing, and probably the desire as well. Whether they will give the full thing away is another matter, but even a cut down version would be nice.

I don’t want to spend time micromanaging stats, even though I am a stats junkie – Google only seem to tell you what they want you to know.

Summing Up Stompernet Site Seer

• It provides some very easy “lazy statistics”
• It can currently be used for 5 websites… or pages – it can already be used to keep tabs on competitors
• You gain access to 23 new instructional videos explaining every step of the site evaluation
• The Stompernet faculty is made up of people I consider as mentors – these guys are good – whilst you should always look for alternative point of view, they know what they are doing.
• It is 100% free of charge

My personal opinion is it is well worth signing up. Just being on the email list and experiencing product launches is a huge learning experience.

I have been enjoying looking at my referral stats at this end, even though they are a little disappointing. One reason I like promoting Stompernet are the affiliate tools, totally custom made.

This was especially significant for me at the time, because I was struggling with a problem which I couldn’t solve.

A few days later 5ubliminal posted, “If I Told You… I’d Have To Kill You” – a simlar idea, again specific to SEO techniques but with a few hints to how you can work out what others are up to… without them telling you.

My End Of year Problem

Lots of sites were publishing their year end stats, showing which were their most popular posts for the year, traffic numbers etc, and many of them were missing one, and in many cases many important statistics that can be used to determine the success of a particular post.

I didn’t post a yearly roundup – it would have been a lie

I know which are my most successful posts based upon various metrics, and the metrics I use are in many cases different to the metrics other people use, and I can use them for competitive intelligence

I wasn’t prepared to write a post highlighting my most popular posts for the year, or the ones I wanted to highlight, if I couldn’t be 100% honest about my methods.

Scribd

The changes Scribd made after the revealing Stompernet videos were really the straw that broke the camel’s back. If you release information without a great deal of restraint on how that information should be used, it can cause problems, and sometimes various tactics and methods stop working, or are prevented from working.

Release The Information In Private?

This is one option I have considered – it would be easy to set up a membership site, or use a report such as this just for list building, or even give it to a number of membership sites I am a member of as a bonus, but that introduces secondary problems.

I am not a programmer

I have worked with programming teams for years, but I can only tinker with code these days. If I released the information to just a few hundred, or possibly a few thousand, there would be 2 very specific problems.

• Only about 10% of the people receiving the information would be able to do anything useful with it – this stuff is a little bit technical, and even once I have all my data together it takes time playing around in excel to really benefit from it, and realise the significance.
• My limited use of these methods flies under the radar – if you have a few 100, or 1000 people mining the same data, it would throw up a huge red flag, quite needlessly, as many would be looking for data on exactly the same websites.

If I make the information available, the ideal solution would be

• A 20 page report
• A viable proxy based extraction and storage system for compiling data
• Various tools, possibly in Excel, to make manipulating the data relatively easy for less technical folk

Oh, Andy Is Going To Sell An Ebook?

Ebooks work for newbie stuff and basic training, or techniques that get hyped but are not necessarily for your average users (even if they are effective)

This isn’t something I want to hype about, and it certainly isn’t basic training

The financial model just wouldn’t cover the development costs

I could also include it in a membership site of my own, but it isn’t something that would stand on its own, I need a lot more time to get together complimentary materials.

With the new year people are planning their course of action for 2008, and this would prove a benefit for their content planning strategy.

Content For Your Membership Site or Agency

Do you remember the days before the junk peddlers of private label rights and bundled master resale rights products when content really had value?

These days the people who create exceptional content only provide it via higher end membership sites, and most, but not all of the ebooks are beginners guides – they can still be good value, but that isn’t the kind of content I want to create.

Over the last year writing this blog I have received a number of proposals of various kinds from membership site owners looking for specialist content, which is why I am considering a slight return to the old ways of providing content to a limited number of partners for a fee that is just a “drop in the ocean” compared to the fees members pay for access to great content, and certainly much better value than retaining me on a permanent basis.

Price – contact me by email for details – I expect to spend up to $5000 on development of the scripts and tools, though depending on the way they are designed, I might also have to provide hosting. I would much prefer to have a comfortable budget for development than to be scraping the barrel.
On top of that I will also be offering support if you provide me access to your member area – there is certainly some 2-way benefit

Initially I am not going to set a specific limit on numbers, but ideally I would like to have the report and tools made available to between 10 and 20 membership sites or agencies

I am including search marketing agencies, because they often have lots of people working with clients with whom they want to share tools and reports. Hopefully a few of the more popular SEO membership sites will pick this up anyway, so small agencies can benefit from their existing memberships, but for larger corporations it would probably be best to purchase your own license.

For further details and possibly a few examples those who have my email can just email me, or you can just use my contact form

I am going to be selective about where this information and tools will be made available

To finish, just one example:-

Which one post was my most successful in 2007? This isn’t 100% accurate because like with all statistical measures there can be extenuating circumstances that mess with the data, and using this method there are frequent occurances within the top10, in much the same way a front page Digg can make a blog seem more popular than it really is.

The Tale of Little Linkalot and Some Blogging Thoughts where I actually linked through to another one of Donna’s posts, “The Tale of Little Linkalot”

If you can work out why I regard that (based on this method) as my most successful post, a “cornerstone” or in some ways “tipping point”, bully for you, but don’t go spreading it around too much ;)
Even if you can work it out, you are going to appreciate a 20 page report on how to use this method to share with your members or clients, and the tools to go with it.

I could have just written a short blog post with my top 50 stories of 2007, provided details for compiling the data, and a very rough excel spreadsheet and a few charts, but it would not be very usable for the majority of non-programming geeks, and the method would be burned or limited within a few hours or days.

Why burn a great method just for a few links?

Adage Power 150

Over the last few days for instance I noticed that Advertising Age have rejigged their Adage Power150 which I previously discussed a few months ago. It is great to see that Google PageRank has a lot less importance, and the inclusion of Yahoo link data, but there is an over reliance on Technorati.

Technorati is easily gamed, because they count links from the sidebar and footer, which can easily be encouraged by creating widgets and WordPress Themes. They do try to clean up their own Top 100 list, manually removing blogs that seem to have an overbearing number of links from viral content.
There are also some aspects of how a theme is designed that have a huge affect on how many links Technorati claim from a single blog, or the number of blogs that Technorati think are at a single domain.
Technorati currently accounts for 70 of the possible 150 total points a blog can receive, and the top ranking blogs can gain close to a full quota, unlike PageRank for which only 6 or 7 points can reasonably be attained.

You will notice that a lot of the Yahoo references show zero – values returned from an API need to be cached and discounted if they are zero, or return a number that is a significant change. I have seen Yahoo numbers drop from 30K links down to less than 9K, only for them to rebound.
It should also be noted that Yahoo also give credit for nofollow links from places like Delicious, Stumbleupon, and even blog comments. Not all links are created equal.

There is a bonus with the changes – I have gone from around 30 on the list to 17 or 18, and Adage is a low but consistent traffic source and has certainly extended my reach with new subscribers.

Top 100 Make Money Blogs

Another list that sends traffic daily is Mark’s, but again it suffers from a number of anomalies.

First of all PageRank plays a visible factor, or I am sure Yaro would be placed a few points higher, he used to be a PR6, and whilst it might not affect position so much, I have highlighed the other sites that currently have a penalty.

There also seems to be a problem with the Technorati rating on a number of blogs being much lower than it should be. I am not sure if this is a canonical domain problem, or some kind of new factor being applied to specific domains for data accessed by API.

Niches

Many niches don’t link out as much as meta blogging and technology blogs, and those in related niches such as venture capital.

As an example regular reader Lucia also has a knitting blog – I know that at times she gets 3 or 4 times as much traffic as me, even without social media influence.

PR3 (I remember it being a 4?), Technorati rank 44,000 (141 blog reactions), Alexa around 200K

The current statistical measures people use just don’t relate to the vast majority of bloggers.

Existing Stats Are Not Accurate?

Alexa is based upon toolbar usage – though their own toolbar isn’t very useful for many people, webmasters in the meta blogging niche can recommend the highly useful Search Status toolbar for Firefox that feeds Alexa with the same data.

Compete used to suffer from poor uptake of their Firefox toolbar because of problems with Firefox, but when Compete was added to the Search Status toolbar, again meta blogging and SEO blogs saw a boost.

With Technorati being used as a factor in so many monetization services, various methods have been used to boost links from other bloggers. Whilst they might get manually edited out of the top100 blogs on Technorati (and I have written how to avoid this several months ago), their numbers still get reported through the API though there is no guarantee that will last forever.

What would top bloggers do if the API for Technorati starts to report zero for anyone that Technorati feel is gaming the system?

Quantcast

Quantcast is accurate, but only if you include their tracking code on your blog and get “Quantified”

If you don’t, you end up claiming they are inaccurate in your end of year stats ;) – sorry Rand, I couldn’t resist that one.

If you compare our data and the SELand data to what Compete, Quantcast or Alexa are reporting, you can see how tragically inaccurate those services are. Sadly, that’s no anomally. Everytime I get access to a client’s visit data, I’m always curious to check the three and have not once found accuracy, even on a relative basis. Third party traffic metrics still have a very, very long way to go.

Just to give you an idea of what happens if you don’t add tracking code to get quantified, here is a comparison between this domain and DoshDosh, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land & SEOmoz.

note:the Quantcast images will display much clearer in a feed reader, they are limited on display width on the blog and forced to a smaller size

Search Engine Land traffic is directly measured, as is my own, the other sites are just a panel estimate. As SEL effectively makes the others almost invisible, lets replace SEL with Marketing Pilgrim

You can see some clear traffic spikes in the panel estimates, probably due to click traffic from other sites which have Quantcast code embedded such as Digg

In fact of the major social news and bookmarking sites, only Digg and Propeller are Quantified.

Why IzeaRanks IS Needed, But Might Be Rejected

When you create a page on a blog to help you sell your advertising inventory, how can an advertiser trust the traffic figures you give them, and why should they have to research whether you in some way gamed the statistics?

If you are a large publisher and it is a significant advertiser, you might be willing to give them access to some real statistics, such as Google Analytics through shared access, or your advertising administration system might provide reasonable stats to advertisers. As an example B5Media use Valueclick – I would hope Valueclick have some tools to provide statistics that can be verified before an advertiser makes a purchase.

Certainly Problogger isn’t listed as Quantified

For smaller publishers it would be possible for them to use existing services like Quantcast, but they don’t, because using Quantcast isn’t being encouraged by the people that count… the monetization services and advertisers.

For all the negative publicity Izea has had due to their PayPerPost service, one thing remains clear – they are an advertising company looking to help bloggers make money. They are not a competitor.

I would be more worried if I was placing tracking code on my blog if Izea in some way were a competitor creating content, such as Performancing with their Metrics service, which Izea themselves almost purchased though then it was a different animal, and not just a branded version of an existing tracking service.

I am a firm believer in not making things too easy for competitors, well with this blog I don’t care so much, but certainly for niche sites. I don’t worry too much about monetization services gaining stats, and I never looked on MyBlogLog having access being a problem. I am not sure if Blogcatalog are collecting anything, but again, they are not exactly running a blog network.

The IzeaRanks interface is honestly pretty basic compared to what is offered by Quantcast as far as raw traffic stats, and you are certainly missing all the segmentation data (though I am not sure how reliable that is).

Izea’s “RealRank” is based upon the following factors (from their announcement)

• 70% weighted towards visitors per day
• 20% weighted towards amount of ACTIVE inbound links per day
• 10% weighted towards pageviews per day

I am not sure whether Izea have come up with a way to have only “Real” pageviews and visitors counted, as many stats packages have problems with the pre-fetching of pages from Stumbleupon causing massive errors.

The active inbound links is an interesting statistic. Links that deliver real traffic. It is relatively easy to build up links and gain PageRank from obscure sites, or to game rankings with themes and widgets, but those links rarely get clicked on by visitors. Even blogrolls are pretty much ignored by visitors unless you have an unfair advantage of your sitename starting with the letter A ;)

Many people state that the value of RealRank will be based upon how many bloggers use it. That is partially true, but the real traffic and unique visitor values will be valuable to advertisers even if just one blogger signed up for the service.

I am disappointed that Izea are not doing anything with feeds, though it is much easier to do that with WordPress blogs than blogs on Blogspot, especially with the way Google have now integrated Blogger and Feedburner. The technical skill that would be needed to feed a feed into izea and back out to Feedburner would cause countless technical support problems, and Izea have enough technical support problems with some of their other services, and no end of headaches.

There is an API, I am sure some smart people will jump on it and use it to provide something useful, though I am not sure how quickly that will happen. The usage restrictions of 5000 calls per day is generous.

It is true that Google might currently look on javascript from Izea as an indication of writing paid posts, but hopefully with Social Spark that will be cleared up. Social Spark will offer total transparency. If you are doing nothing wrong, it probably isn’t going to be a major problem even if Google clock up even more false positives for a short while. If you are doing something naughty, you are probably going to be caught anyway.

Do You Have An Advertising Sales Page?

If you have an advertising sales page on your blog, have no doubt that advertisers will start to expect the availability of real statistics, not something you quote from AWStats.
AWStats typically reports around 6x as many page views compared to javascript based tracking on my blog, and quite a few more unique visitors.

You could include Quantcast, but you might as well include IzeaRank at the same time especially if some smart people come up with a way to present the stats effectively.
I can see Paul’s point at Mashable, that Izea maybe should have concentrated on the whole of the internet, and not just the blogosphere, but you could argue that the BBC or the Washington Post should be included in the Technorati Top100 as well, because they offer RSS feeds.

In my mind the individual rating of blogs by RealRank is meaningless unless it it put into context of their topical niche, such as I could compare Mashable with Techcrunch on Quantcast and discover that neither are quantified, so the statistics are totally worthless.

I can understand why Darren doesn’t necessarily need it, or other B5 Media Blogs, but many niche bloggers do need something they can use to demonstrate their relative worth. Just a week ago a key tip from Shoemoney on Darren’s blog was about a clear advertising page.

Is there a difference between clear and transparent/honest/uncoloured ?

How much creative license should people use to sell advertising?

I am writing this article because I keep on being asked the same questions, not with the intention of beating the drum about Blogrush, or to promote my referral link. In fact you won’t even find my referral link in this article. Go and use someone else’s, or look at one of my previous articles.

I thought about adding some “notice me” links in this post (that was more just to say thanks), but that isn’t my style.

Lots of the people who have been making mistakes in their professional analysis in theory subscribe to my blog, thus I am not going to single them out.
There have been a lot of anti-hype articles, and I also still have some reservations, but that doesn’t justify articles full of criticism that don’t contain facts, or contain interpretation of facts that are so obviously full of mistakes, I am amazed they were written by the person credited.

I thought I would show you a little bit of proof that Blogrush sends traffic to small blogs.

First of all here is the traffic to my WordPress Plugins site which hasn’t really been touched for 12 months.

So that is 60 readers, and 131 page views since Blogrush launched – the site is 2 years old, PR5, so it does get a little seasonal search traffic, which is picking up this time of year.

Here are the stats from Blogrush

So when I took that screenshot earlier yesterday to show to someone, I had had 5 referrers. I should have possibly waited with my screenshot, it is actually 75 readers, 179 views and 10 clicks through from Blogrush.

That Doesn’t Mean I Had A Great CTR

That blog hasn’t only received 149 credits, it has gained lots of bonus credits, though it is impossible to tell how many.

Many people really didn’t understand this message on the stats page.

Special Note: All Members are currently receiving BONUS CREDITS that are not yet reflected in these statistics.

Your referral credits are not being used currently… there is no way to allocate them if you have multiple blogs.

Some blogs are in categories where they can’t use all the credits they have been generating.

John Reese said in an email to members yesterday (summarized) CTR problems can be solved with:-

1. Better titles, and gave some great examples
2. More categories are needed for better targeting – also of note in that point is that if you have people averaging 0.5% CTR, the widget itself is averaging 2.5% CTR – that is a conceptual difference people might not realise.
3. Fraud – expect a big clamp down and permanent bans – I hope people weren’t being evil and expecting to get away with it.

I am not going to show off a load of referrals, though I have got quite a few. I am also even more happy that my downline have got referrals and are benefiting from the free credits in the system. Not everyone has had great success, there are some inherent problems, but these things will be ironed out.

Here is an easy way to understand this.

A few people are referring to Blogrush as a pyramid scheme

However there isn’t any money changing hands, and there is another problem with their theory. What happens with all the excess inventory that isn’t spoken for by referral credits?

Until the referral matrix gets deeper than 10 levels, and referral credits are actually used, there are a lot of spare credits that need to be assigned to something, and those are the credits that created additional visitors to my plugins site.

Lots of the high traffic blogs are in the top level of the referral structure, so there will always be a large amount of these free credits. Blogrush had a very explosive start, and there are 100s if not 1000s of blogs in the top level.

A blog with 30,000 pageviews per day in the top level is generating 150,000 RSS impressions, but only gaining 30,000 for itself. Blogrush use 10% to cover their costs.

That leaves 105,000 credits per day for Blogrush to hand out for free. They are not being handed out to an upline that doesn’t exist.

I have no specific details of how the credits are being shared out, but it seems smaller blogs are receiving windfalls (in my estimate) of 1000 credits or more per day.

The Blackhat Threat

Alex Goad pinged me about some of the blackhat games that Blogrush faces. It is true, but I wouldn’t class any venture by John Reese as low hanging fruit.

Over on Problogger John Reese has stated:-

That’s for all the great feedback. We’re working really hard to make some “must needed” improvements due to some unforseen issues we’ve encountered. Fraud has really hurt us in the early going and is dilluting the CTRs across the entire network. We’re moving to a 100% Manual Review Process and this will not only eliminate most of the cheaters but will also eliminate all the low-quality blogs in the network.

Don’t doubt for a minute whether John has the resources to hire 10 or 20 people to manually review every single site if that becomes necessary, but lots of tools are fairly easy to create to make the process much more efficient.

Lots of people have asked me about what traffic I have received. It has possibly decreased over the last couple of days due to the spamming, but here is a screenshot I took yesterday.

So we don’t just trust MyBlogLog tracking, we also should compare it to another source. Google Analytics will do for this purpose.

I actually waited for a day so that the Google Analytics data could be compared.

How to see this in Google Analytics?

1. Go to Traffic Sources >> All Traffic Sources
2. Find source medium [containing] widget.blogrush.com
3. Click on what is probably just a single result listing containing the combined referrals

Now whilst there is an obvious decline, that doesn’t necessarily mean it is all caused by spammers. It might also mean that the free credits in the system are being applied differently, or that they are being spread thinner.
If they are being spread thinner, that actually makes me happy, because that means more of my referrals are gaining a little free traffic. Maybe it is just an extra 10 visitors per day, but when you have less than 100 visitors per day, that is significant if it is targeted.

The decline can also be caused by articles that are just not compelling enough for people to click on them. I am sure this article will not receive a lot of traffic, and will probably only be read by my regular readers.

I don’t write articles specifically to get high traffic from every single one. I just try to provide useful information and title it appropriately.

I have lots of referrals, and so do many of my downline, but those credits are not being used currently, because there is no interface to allocate them.

My guesstimate is that I have probably had 15,000 to 20,000 impressions so far.

• Do your own testing and tracking
• Compare it to the value of screen real estate
• Decide whether it works for you
• Give it some time, and think of your readers (sharing traffic is good for you)

Update

John Reese responded to the discussion on Alex’s Blogrush post with a couple of comments, one explaining the algorithm a little explaining why Blogrush shouldn’t be looked on as a Pyramid or Ponzi scheme (all credits in the system are earned, nothing is projected forward, upwards allocation of credit), but also made the following statement which I feel is very significant.

The only reason some impressions are “held back” and not immediately delivered are because the system continues to ‘adjust’ based on the network size itself, as well as how many members in each category — because we serve each members’ credits in the category they choose. There ‘can’ be an imbalance of inventory in certain categories, but we’re able to make up that adjustment based on the “breakage” of math that occurs because all the accounts that immediately signed up essentially joined ‘under’ BlogRush — and so the network has a large percentage of surplus; which we are currently auto-distributing to all the members equally to help them get more traffic. We have plans to eventually give most of the bonus credits to our SMALL USERS since they need the traffic the most.

Whilst many people are looking on Blogrush as being a pyramid scam and the rich are feeding off the poor, I am increasing feeling that in many ways this will become more of a Robin Hood scenario.

Whilst the big blogs will generate more credits themselves, and lots of referrals, they will not gain the same CTR as smaller unknown blogs, because people are using Blogrush for discovery.
With John highlighting that the surplus inventory is mainly going to go to smaller blogs in the future, this really is going to be robbing the rich to feed the poor, and a blog like Shoemoney or Problogger probably signed up directly.

Andy Beal being such a smart marketer probably signed Marketing Pilgrim up under his wife’s Hawaii Vacation Blog. Despite the drama, if he removes the widget, his wife’s blog will receive less credits to allocate – what a dilemma to be in ;) – note those credits can’t be allocated currently.
Andy hasn’t yet published any real stats (from 3rd party tracking), but I would love to see what traffic his wife’s blog has received in Google Analytics, and whether that traffic was more worthwhile than the traffic Marketing Pilgrim receives.
I honestly wouldn’t click on one of Andy’s ads, because I am already a subscriber, but I did just see my WordPress Plugins site advertised on his site, and that doesn’t have a compelling title.

I have been signed up for Feedburner Pro for a while

Feedburner Pro – I don’t use all the features

Here are the settings I currently use for my Feedburner Pro Total stats

You will notice that the setting I don’t use is click stats, and this is for 3 very specific reasons.

With total stats, the links that appear in feeds are converted to tracking links. They have a special SEO option, that passes link juice, but unfortunately (or fortunately in some situations) not all search engines count a 301 redirect as a valid link to your domains, notably Technorati which can be used to your advantage too.

This has an effect on links from the following

Syndicated Content (with or without permission)

Those permalinks to your article are a good way to detect where your content is being used. Some syndication sites are not very smart, and don’t pick up the permalink address within a Feedburner feed correctly, and would use the header link that is a Feedburner redirect.
You wouldn’t be able to do a search for links to your domain, and the link isn’t detected by Technorati.

Social Networds & Bookmarking

Some sites pick up your feeds and display a snippet. It takes additional programming to take into account Feedburner formatting.
Many of these sites the links qualify as links in Technorati to your domain.

Links from your Readers

Someone is reading your feed… great!

They see one of your articles, and decide to link through to you… even better!

They pick up your link from within the Feedburner feed showing in their feed reader… with the redirect – You will get search engine benefit, but no pingback / trackback, and it won’t show up in Technorati or help your authority.

Linking Mistakes

I went into a lot more details about these kinds of problems in my recent linking mistakes article.

Mybrand

Feedburner have had a “Mybrand” service for a while, though I haven’t actually attempted to use it. It allows you to consolidate your feeds on a subdomain of your website.

Now it is a totally free service I am going to give it a try sometime soon to see if it will help prevent reporting errors of subscribers.

Whilst in theory this would also help you retain ownership of your content, I don’t know of another feed tracking service with a similar service, and none so far really compare to Feedburner anyway, although for email subscriptions Zookoda provide more features, but the stats as far as I am aware are not reported back to Feedburner for a consolidated number of subscribers.

Feedburner have a near monopoly of rss feed stats, and whilst I predicted that the pro features would become free soon, and we might also see more integration with other Google services such as Analytics, I am still not 100% it was a good idea.

Conclusion

If you do decide to switch on Total Stats, think carefully about whether complete click tracking is important to you, or whether you would prefer to have more links.

As far as I am currently aware, Clicky, developed by Roxr Software Ltd are not a direct competitor, and thus in my mind them having access to my data is potentially less risk.

Accuracy of Tracking Data

The accuracy of your tracking data is important, thus I am doing a test

Clicky
Performancing Metrics
Mybloglog

Just to give Performancing Metrics a slight advantage, I am going to include their tracking data first in my page.

Clicky does seem to have an edge currently on interface over MyBlogLog, but remember that as I previously wrote, MyBlogLog might well have an API available soon and that historical data is highly valuable if you have been using them for a while.

Also what happens if Clicky gets acquired? I feel more confident in a change over and longevity of the service if it is not being hosted on 3rd party servers.
If Performancing Metrics was just an affiliate white label, and they didn’t have anything to do with my data, I would be much happier to recommend them, but at this stage, Clicky direct gets my vote.

Update

Performancing Metrics and Clicky don’t seem to want to co-exist, thus one of them has to go at least until they improve their scripts so that they truly are different. Maybe there is a problem with shared declaration.

Performancing Metrics

Nothing highly personal, I would just prefer Clicky to have my data rather than Performancing.

UPDATE:- based on the information I currently have, I would much prefer to use and recommend the use of the Clicky service directly, rather than a white label version hosted by Performancing.

As is a tradition on this blog, I don’t have any favoritism, and I don’t hold any punches. It is what my readers expect, especially when I am also including affiliate links in a review.

Better The Devil You Know

There is a saying “Better the devil you know, than the devil you don’t”

Another equally good expression is “A wolf in sheep’s clothing”

Is Performancing Metrics A Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing?

Possibly…

Splashpress Media

Splashpress media is the owner of Performancing.com , along with many notable blogs such as the Blog Herald.

I haven’t had any direct dealings with the guys at Splashpress Media, though I have frequented their blogs, linked to them, they link to me etc.
But…

Splashpress Media Are Competitors

If you are in a profitable niche, maybe they are not in your niche now, but they may be in the future.

Their terms and conditions suggest that they will not provide your data to third parties, but that doesn’t prevent them aggregating data for their own use.

Performancing Tracks Everything

The Performancing Metrics service is tracking click data, and that could well include monetization links to affiliate programs, advertising and PPC.
Performancing also tracks page views

This data even if just looked on in an aggregated manner could be used to identify niche markets that are profitable or experiencing high growth.

Bad Taste

I was debating whether to mention this, but decided it would be best to have everything out in the open from the off.

Recently there was a blogosphere scandal regarding MyBlogLog tracking Adsense clicks. I don’t know how the “learned” A-list “reputable” bloggers could have missed it as it was reported on a number of prominent blogs previously, and it was obvious the data was being tracked.

Performancing.com is edited by David Krug
901AM is owned by David Krug

Just a few weeks ago Duncan Riley was writing for 901AM (he is just a paid seat there), and reporting on the “MyBlogLog Adsense scandal“, which didn’t really exist.

It doesn’t take much effort to research whether you have your head stuck in the sand, or whether there is something real to any story. As an example Darren Rouse first reported about the Adsense feature back in September 2006, and Michael Gray had discussed it as well.

I actually noted at the time Duncan’s piece was written that in the footer of David Krug’s 901AM blog was a reference to Performancing Metrics, pre-prepared to become a hyperlink to a sister site in the future.

I actually still have a screenshot of the full story.

It will be interesting to see how many people who attacked MyBlogLog’s Adsense tracking write balanced reviews of Performancing Metrics.

You see there were 2 key points

• Whether people knew about the tracking
• Would tracking Adsense really get you banned

As mentioned above, Darren Rouse and a number of others had reported it, and as I previously wrote, it was fairly obvious that MyBlogLog was tracking Adsense.

Can tracking Adsense get you banned? Actually it may be the opposite, the only way to defend yourself if you are accused of click-fraud, and the only way to determine whether Adsese are tracking your clicks correctly.

Jeremy Zawodny was previously asking people whether their MyBlogLog Adsense tracking results compared well with those clicks allocated by Google. Don certainly saw a difference, and discussed the differences in stats with the Adsense team. That wsn’t the first occurrence.

It should also be noted that Performancing Metrics in its previous incarnation always tracked Adsense stats. It was a known feature, as is the case with many stats packages.

As far as I am concerned the story was ill-conceived hackbait, and as 901AM was connected with a soon to launch competitor, they definately shouldn’t have run the story, even if it was topical and written by a 3rd party (Duncan has no direct interest in Performancing Metrics)

Performancing Metrics Has Great Features

So that is the negativity out of the way, lets look at Performancing Metrics and what it has to offer.

It is free for most bloggers and cheap for the rest of us
The statistics seem to be accurate
The statistics are “almost live” due to caching, but much faster than things like Google Analytics
The interface is fast – Google Analytics honestly after more than a year still runds exceptionally slowly

This isn’t the old Performancing Metrics that were highly rates, but honestly I never really liked the interface. The new Performancing Metrics is Slick.

Would I use Performancing Metrics?

Damn tough question… probably on a few sites.

Whilst I might universally use Google Analytics on every site I own, I doubt I would use Performancing Metrics on my niche blogs that are not public knowledge.

I might use them on a few public sites, including this one although I would much prefer a situation that a purely monetization company is running a statistics service, and not a potential competitor.

Once I have some more stats to compare over the next week, I will write a full review.

But Performancing Metrics isn’t Performancing Metrics

It is just a rebranded version of Clicky as is being reported.

Do Performancing still get access to the data, and why no mention of this in the terms of service?

Here is the answer:-

It is not just a ploy to earn affiliate commissions – he has “officially” licensed our product and is hosting it on the Performancing servers. He believes in our product, as do we, otherwise we wouldn’t be in this position. I don’t know what else to say, but I think you are being overly negative for no good reason.

MyBlogLog API – Is There Going To Be One?

Absolutely, no doubt whatsoever, the question is when.

Scott Rafer stated this in the comments of my MyBlogLog Wish List post not so long ago.

Andy, we’re doing our best to assemble an API. Thanks for your suggestions.

What Type of Data Might MyBlogLog Make Available?

MyBlogLog Directly Related Data

• The communites you belong to
• The RSS Feed address of the communities
• Del.icio.us, Flickr and other membership details
• Your contacts and their details
• Comments

MyBlogLog Tracking Data

• Recent Visitors to your Community
• Recent Visitors to your Profile
• Specific Tracking Data of each Visitor
• Historical Data

Stanley Milgram’s Theory

“No two people are more than six degrees apart”

There is no guarantee that MyBlogLog will allow access to your extended network completely, but this is the theory networks like LinkedIn and Xing are founded upon.

You could potentially have access to:-

• The Blogs your readers are interested in
• The Contacts your readers have made
• The Sites that are most popular in your community

Mashups

I mentioned some of the possibilities in my MyBlogLog wish list. Here is a shorter version

Access to OPML will allow:-

• RSS Feed Readers
• Personal Community Meme Trackers
• 2nd Degree Community Meme Trackers
• Parse Tags and have topic based Meme Trakers
• Community Widgets
• Community Based Custom Search
• Ajax Start Page

Access to Tracking will allow:-

• Visual representation of tracking data
• Pinpoint what interests your core readership
• Combine tracking data with Adsense account data
• Tracking Data Widgets

Access to Comments will allow:-

• Community Discussion
• Merge MBL comments with comments on your blog

MyBlogLog Is Still Alive?

MyBlogLog popularity certainly took a little bit of a dip over the last month but is recovering strongly

Yesterday I happened upon something maybe of significance when I spotted Nick Baum who is the project manager for Google Reader had created an account on MyBlogLog for his private blog. It should be noted that he doesn’t discuss Google matters on his private blog.

I did however drop him a question via the MyBlogLog message system.

Nick did answer that message in private, but I couldn’t publish the answer yesterday because it was a private message, and might well have jumped the gun on an official announcement.

From the Google Reader Blog

Publishers have been asking us to report the number of users that are subscribed to their feeds in Google Reader. This is something we’ve been wanting to do for a while, but with all the products that use feeds at Google, corralling the data in one place was like herding cats. So herd we did, and as of today, our crawler reports the number of Google users subscribed to the feed. The count includes subscribers from Google Reader and the Google Personalized Homepage, and in the future may include other Google products that support feeds.

Great… wonderful… amazing news – thanks Google Reader team!

Now for Some Speculation

You might notice I bolded the following:-

and in the future may include other Google products that support feeds

This is pure speculation, but 2007 has just started and a lot is possible.

• Blogger – Google already have avatars for Blogger accounts, but don’t have a much of a social network wrapped around Blogger interaction. Even WordPress.com have much better “community” between their bloggers with shared tag feeds and various dashboard features.
• Google Personalized Homepage – this doesn’t have any form of sharing yet, unlike Pageflakes or Netvibes
• Google Talk – allows you to set an avatar to be displayed
• Google Co-op CSE – Again, you can join as an editor of a Google Co-op search engine and it will display your avatar
• Gmail allows you to set an avatar



• YouTube – Yes Google already own one social network, but it isn’t yet fully integrated with the multitude of other Google services – login at YouTube isn’t yet unified – I wonder how far that is from becoming a reality
• Google Video – currently no social features
• Personal Search – Would Google ever provide users with the ability to share what they have been search for to friends and family – yes I know there are privacy concerns, depending on what you search for ;) – you could have an option “share this search”
• Google Reader Shared Feeds – I don’t share items, because I don’t support the fact that publishers don’t have a choice about their full content being shared. Snippets isn’t a problem, as long as there will be a way to warn you before you share private information you might subscribe to.
• Groups – Google Groups are not really integrated very well with your online experience and either you have to fill up your mailbox with unwanted emails, or you have to make a concious decision to visit.
• Picassa – You can share your photos, but again it is something separate from other Google Services
• Google Documents – lots of sharing possible
• Google Calendar – you can share your calendar, and this is one of the strongest features, but it is not well integrated with other services

Yahoo are looking strongly at integration of services. They have APIs for most of their social services, have just released Yahoo Pipes, and they purchased MyBlogLog.

Google does provide a lot of “behind the scenes” APIs for services, and it is possible to create a mashup service if you trust someone else with your Google account info – I wouldn’t personally share my Google account info with anyone – well my wife can retrieve my password if required, though she doesn’t have that need currently.
I didn’t list private services such as Adwords, Adsense and Analytics – maybe those could become a more private portal. It would certainly be useful to merge the data with more than just a hack.

Google is Missing Glue

You know… that substance that joins things together… and makes them sticky.

Google seem to be keeping very quiet about social network plans. Googlers have always been very good at keeping secrets, and have extreme job loyalty. I would think the majority of people who have left employment at Google over the last few years probably did so because they will probably never have to work again or for health reasons. Yes some people whose company has been acquired eventually leave, but financial security does allow a few entrepreneurial freedoms.

My prediction – sometime during 2007 Google will announce a major social networking platform that provides the glue between all their vast array of services.