Okay, so this strange web site called eirikso.com has just written something about your company and you have no idea how big this site is. How many people will read this guys rants…?
First, I have to tell you that if someone write something about you on the internet you should never underestimate the potential amount of readers. One example is Vincent Ferrari’s “Insignificant Thoughts“. After posting a taped conversation with an AOL customer representative his thoughts where not so insignificant anymore. The big traffic drivers kicked in and Mr. Ferrari eventually ended up on NBC.
But, you want to do some quick research just to find out if thousands of people will read this stuff immediately or not…
1. Check the website itself
Is the site publishing how many subscribers it has? For this site the circulation is currently between 500 and 600 people.
Then, check the amount of comments. Many comments usually mean a bit of readers, and always mean pretty passionate readers.
Next is to check for any logos from statcounter, sitemeter, shinystat etc… Some sites publish their traffic.
2. Look up traffic data with alexa.com
Not very reliable on small sites, and tend to favour american sites, but will give you an indication of the traffic. In the illustration here the chart shows eirikso.com compared to the biggest financial newspaper in Norway, Dagens Næringsliv. And here’s the link to alexa.com. You simply enter the url in the search form and click “site info” when the results have come up.
3. Always google. Always.
If you search for eirikso in google you get about 50 600 hits. “eirikso” is not a very common english word, so this could be an indication of the fact that people mention this site out there. Also, the Google Page Rank of a site is an indication of how serious google finds it. The page rank is a scale from 0 to 10 where the most important sites have a page rank of 10 and the pretty insignificant ones have 0. Eirikso.com are currently on 5. You can check the page rank of any site here. (Please note that you should always check the site with www in the site-name. Ie. www.eirikso.com and not simply eirikso.com).
4. Use technorati blog tracking
Technorati have had their share of bugs and problems but they are slowly turning into a pretty good tool to find stuff in the blogsphere and to do quick checks on blogs. Technorati’s rank is based on how many blogs that links to the site you are checking. They currently track 57 million blogs. Eirikso.com have a rank of 15 071 right now. Far from the really big blogs, but above average in the crowd of 57 million…
5. Subscribe to the RSS-feed
Not all blogs publish their circulation. If you want a hint then sign up for the RSS feed of the site you want to check in Bloglines or Newsgator Online. They will tell you how many other users that subscribe to this feed in this reader. A very very very inaccurate estimate for the total circulation would be to multiply this number by something between five and ten…
Feel free to add additional ways to check up on a web site in the comments!
To cut this down in numbers of pages in a presentation you could present it like this:
Page 1:
Checking the size of a website
- Primary sources (your point 1)
- Secondary sources (your point 2-5)
Page 2 and 3:
One page for each (primary and secondary sources).
Depending on you audience you migh have to use more pages, depending on how deep you are going to present it/how experienced your audience is.
This articel is more a tutorial than a presentation, but since I did not know anything about all your five point I did learn something from it! So in my case you “scored”!
So as you are into it (or anyway), do you have any experience with earning money on the net. In this case on a website. I then think of ads, selling pictures etc…. Is it easy, what scale do we talk about? Any strategy in this matter?
You might ad that it might be worth checking the points you mention against the age of the blog in question. The age is easily seen by the Archives section included in most blogs. A newer blog will probably have fewer subscribers than an older and more established one – unless they have had a big traffic driver.
Good point!