When you’re looking for new content, good content, or just plain old information, where do you go? Technorati used to be the place, but that era has, sadly, passed. I often hit Google Blog Search, which can give me some okay results, but no measure of how good the blog is compared to other blogs in that niche. Really the solution is right at hand, it’s PostRank which has been helping me sift through content to get the wheat from the chaff for years.
Today Melanie announced PostRank’s Top Blogs of 2009 and before your think it’s a popularity contest based solely on links and traffic, you’re wrong. Really, really wrong. What PostRank does is measure how engaged your readers are with your content. Your content compared to you. So you can have a smallish readership, and still rank very high on their scale if your readers leave lots of comments and share your links a lot. Here are the criteria that PostRank used:
Each topic contains a ranked list of blogs, along with each blog’s engagement profile and top posts for all of 2009. However, we didn’t feel that handing out just one award per topic (Most Engagement) told the whole story, so we are highlighting three notable achievements per topic:
- Most Engagement
- Most Influential
- Biggest Movers & Shakers
link: Announcing the PostRank Top Blogs of 2009! | PostRank Blog
And as you can gather from the title, I did make the list in a few categories. I only made the list because you like the stuff I write. Sure, I have to write it, but if I write crap, doesn’t matter how much traffic I have, it’s still crap.
So thank you for helping me make the list!
If you’d like to start with PostRank, the best thing to do is check out their filtered RSS feeds on the topics you’re interested int. You’ll be amazed at the stuff you’ll get. Of course if you’re using WordPress you really should have the PostRank plugin installed to help you see what your readers like. Knowing what people like can help you with content decisions, and you can learn from popular posts what resonates on particular topics.
Give it a shot and you might be on the list for 2010.
