It's summer, and school is out, but I couldn't resist finding out the score for the BMB Blog.
Social marketing company Hubspot has created The Blog Grader, where you can measure the marketing mojo of your blog. The application will score your blog on criteria such as domain name, Twitter mentions, estimated traffic, number of comments and how often you post. Like most things on the Internet these days, this service is free.
You can imagine my disappointment when the BMB Blog scored a mere 15 out of 100 (!) I'm not surprised though, as we haven't even officially launched the blog. But still, ouch, that hurts.
Just for fun, I thought I'd find out how some other blogs stacked up.
Heather Armstrong's Dooce weighed in at 91. The blog "ranked 32,379 out of the approximately 405,546 other blogs that we've graded". She had 10 posts in her RSS feed, and HubSpot suggested she
should have a few more, as it "would increase the visibility of posts to new subscribers and search engines". Her estimated traffic was 135,187 unique visitors last month and she seems to post every day, with her average post containing approximately 320 words.
Of course, the Hubspot service is designed more for ranking business blogs. While some of the information is interesting, I'm not sure how relevant it is for personal blogs and also I'm not sure how healthy it is for bloggers to obsess on these stats. I did think it was interesting that my average post takes only 51 seconds to read!
FYI -- The Times Alpha Mummy scored 64 and A Modern Mother scored 77, but I'm not keeping track. ;-)
Go ahead ... get your grade: Hubspot's blog grader