I have never been ambitious about this blog. I mean, I wanted people to read it and everything, but once people did, I was all, okay good.
But last night we had a big storm and I wasn't gonna go anywhere in all that mess and anyway I have no idea where a separated 45-year-old is supposed to go on a Friday night, so I started thinking about my dumb blog. Is it poopular? Is it poopular at parties?
Here are some tools to check your blog's popularity. I had to search everywhere for this, so I thought I'd make you a nice list.
And if you don't have a blog? This post is gonna bore the CRAP out of you.
Sitemeter. Since almost day one, I have used sitemeter, which tells you how many people looked at you. Also it tells you your page views, where the people came from, what they were eating while they read you, if they were naked, and so forth.
I am certain my friend dcrmom put that sitemeter button or whatever up for me, since I assure you I am incapable of doing it myself.
Now, if you look at me and my potato at 8:00 in the morning and let's just say you can't get enough of me and look at me two hours later, that will count as two people looking at me that day. It counts you as a new reader every 30 minutes.
Sitemeter tells me I got something like 50,000 people looking at me last month, and I think it was 120,000 page views.
Now, Typepad, who, you know, brings you this blog, has their own counter thing and it tells me my numbers are way higher than that. So how do THEY count? Do I know?
urlfan. This is a cool site where you just type in your blog address and it tells you your rank in the grand scheme of things. This extremely popular blog is 307,579th most popular out of 3,783,534 websites. I know! It's lonely at the top.
prchecker. If you want to be totally humiliated, PRChecker will show you how your page ranks on Google. You have to do one of those annoying things where you type in a code to show you're not a robot, WHICH I TOTALLY AM, but it was worth it because I found out this site? Has a page rank of 2/10 on Google. Wooooooo! I am huge!
Alexa. This site is really swanky. It not only told me where I rank in the US and the world (I rule the world), it also told me how many sites link to me, what words made people come here (stupid Casey Chase again, who I DON'T EVEN KNOW, got the most people, along with any time I mention Dooce), and it told me about all y'all all. You're generally college-educated with master's degrees (good job!), 35-44, have no children, and browse this site from home. How the Sam Hill do they know that?
quantcast. They give you a fancy chart that looks like a heart monitor showing you how many readers you have. Now, they told me I have way fewer readers than sitemeter does. And by the way, when I started typing in my address, they suggested "byebyehemorrhoids," and I am totally changing this blog name.
Anyway, they tell you how many people are addicts, meaning they have to tune in every day, how many come by a few times a week, etc. Also, what cities and states visit me (and their info is similar to my recent survey--my biggest readership is in Texas, California, Michigan and NC), and just a ton of other really informative--why is Edsel licking the floor?
popuri. This tells you a whole bunch of stuff in a hurry: your Google page rank, your Alexa rank, how many Yahoo backlinks you have, whether you like to drink Yoo-Hoo, and so on, but I think your blog has to be relatively big to get any results from it. For example, it told me my "Compete" rank was 184, which, you know, great. It had a link to click for details, but when I clicked it, they had no info. So, yeah. Useful.
BlogGrader. This was my favorite one. They looked at my whole blog, and quickly gave me all kinds of info on how to improve it and told me what I was doing right. The length of my posts are good, but my titles are too long (like I didn't know that). I should be adding a button so you can re-Tweet my fabulous posts to your friends, which took me 78 hours to figure out how to do last night, but please note I DID IT.
My only criticism of this cool site is they gave me a grade of 90, and hi. Ninety out of what? I assume 100, but nowhere do they tell you that.
At any rate, all this checking around told me this blog pretty much sucks in the poopularlity department, and perhaps it's because I say things like "poopularity."
Let me know what your numbers are, so I can feel superior or inferior based on your numbers. Because my entire self-worth is now hinging on my blog. Which is healthy.
