Wednesday, April 13, 2005
Using Blogs To Build Your Influence
In my last post about the teleseminar series with business experts, I didn't elaborate on what I’ll be discussing in my seminar. Well here’s a sneak peak for you.
I’ll be discussing blogs and personal branding – “ how to use blogs to market yourself and your products or services online.
Here’s the writeup on my talk that I gave Denise.
Blogging has given a voice to even the non-technical layperson who has something to share with the rest of the universe. If you want to market your products and services online, blogs are ideal personal branding vehicles that you can use to share your expertise, grow your influence and establish yourself as an expert in your field.
You’ll have to tune in to hear the talk but if you’d like me to answer any questions in particular, do post them in the comments section and I’ll include them in my discussion.
Robin Good covered something very similar in this post that I got via Steve Rubel on how to measure a blogger’s credibility.
He starts the post with a paragraph that goes something along the lines of my writeup above.
Becoming a reference source of information, once an impossible task for an individual, is now within the reach of anyone. With enough wit, perseverance and communication skills anyone can use the Internet as the key vehicle to realize this ambitious challenge.
Good outlines a few key indicators that you can use to measure a blogger’s credibility. I think a few of the same indicators can be applied to measure the reach and influence of blogs or any online business in general.
Lets have a little fun, shall we, and see how I do on these indicators. 
Well, I publish one newsletter regularly (had to cut it down from two to maintain my sanity), but many mailing lists. My internet marketing newsletter has over 4000 subscribers and growing.
Then I have a mailing list for those interested in business blogging (which you can subscribe to on this blog), a few other lists on health and wellness… hell, I’ve lost track. 
Never mind. I guess I did pretty OK on that score as well.
I can say that on this count I rank a 10/10.
My traffic stats are publicly viewable, not only for my blogs (click on the tracker at the bottom of this page to see them) but for all my websites as well. They might not seem like a lot, but this blog is just 5 months old.
I do have an excellent Alexa ranking for my EbizWhiz Publishing site. But then that site is over two years old. And its useful mainly to webmasters - who use the Alexa toolbar most.
Google me (without quotes) and you should find over 50,000 listings with my personal bio at the top of the list. Decent score there. A search of my name within quotes shows up less than 10,000 listings, however (probably because some articles list my full name – Priya Florence Shah).
Yahoo Search gives better if somewhat similar results with over 25,000 listings. MSN Search shows the same number as Google search with quotes.
Marketleap’s site popularity test. This allows you to calculate an average popularity score for any site by adding up results from all major search engines and to compare the site both with other similar ones that you can custom specify but also with an existing selection of popular sites in most major industries.
When I checked http://www.blogbrandz.com/ against two of my favourite blogs -http://www.micropersuasion.com/ and http://www.masternewmedia.org/, it showed a total of 3,630 links for my blog, which put it in the category of sites having an “average” presence.
To no one’s surprise, Robin Good and Steve Rubel’s site are “players” (orange section at the bottom) with 119,845 and 176,960 links respectively.
BlogPulse Trends gave me over 200 listings from the last 6 months, many from my own blog posts. The Blogpulse conversation tracker picked up barely 3 results. Those results could definitely be better, so that means I have to take steps to boost my participation in more “conversations.”
I’m not sure how the two tools differ as far as measurement goes. Will someone explain that to me, please?
Unfortunately my media coverage is restricted to online media, since (except for my Making India Green site which was covered by Digit magazine) I’ve never been covered by either local Indian media (though I’ve written for a few) or international.
So I get a rather low score there, but on the whole I did pretty OK. What do you think?
Not surprisingly, not everyone agrees with these standards of measuring a blogger’s popularity or influence. I personally think it depends on who you’re trying to influence, how and why.
If your blog is reaching its target audience in a way that gives you a good return on investment(ROI), then you don’t really need these standards to measure your success and reach.
I do agree with Jim Kukral when he says:
If you want to be "successful" as a blogger, do one thing, and do it right... blog well. Follow the work, success will come.
GrayWolf makes a valid point when he notes:
The problem is three of these factors are nothing more than a measure of website popularity. Popularity is not Credibility!
For example Mafia kingpin John Gotti was wildly popular, he received hundreds of fan letters even after he was incarcerated and was serving time in jail. So he was popular but other than when he ordered a hit, not a very credible person.
Clickable Culture has the same objection, noting that:
Is popularity even related to credibility? No, as evidenced by my millions-of-monthly-hits-generating Babies With Beards web site. Popularity can be assigned significance based on your knowledge of the entity in question... if you don't know anything about your subject, you can only guess as to the reasons for its popularity.
We are then left with credibility. And the best measurement for that, in my opinion, is the writing of the person you're scrutinising. Take everything with a grain of salt, cross-reference factual statements, and you'll be able to figure out the credibility issue pretty quickly. It ain't rocket-science.
Well, one thing I did consider to be a measure of greater influence was when I wrote that post on Blog Burnout and it got picked up by so many blogs, that I had to use an online translator to figure out what people were saying about it.
Now that's what I call expanding your circle of influence!
