Get Ranked, Not Spanked, with IZEA RealRank

In the beginning (August 2005), I started my first blog, Roxiticus Desperate Housewives. I liked the idea of writing and maintaining a public blog, but had no idea where I was going with it. I had no clue what PageRank was, nor did I care about search engine optimization. I had fewer than ten readers, including my Bestest Pal and various friends and family members who stopped by once to be polite. I joined BlogExplosion in order to find and read Other People's Blogs (OPB). Other bloggers were mean to me and I was thin-skinned, so I left the blogosphere and hid in the Roxiticus Valley for more than two years.

In January 2008, I caught a wicked cold and lay on my couch for two days, blogging in earnest and learning about all the things I had missed. I read quirky blog posts that threw in non sequiturs linked to odd places and wondered why. I came up with the idea of posting the Best of the Roxiticus Valley Directories (Best of Mendham, Bernardsville, Chester, Far Hills, Peapack-Gladstone, Morris County and Somerset County NJ, as well as Best Kid Stuff). Either from having a blog in existence for over two years or by adding all of that valuable content, my Roxiticus Desperate Housewives blog had a Google PageRank of 2. People I didn't know started to read my blog, make comments, and I began to make friends in the blogosphere. Unlike my prior experience, this time I found that my fellow bloggers were nice....and helpful.

Once I started to understand that the non sequitur links in quirky blog posts were paid posts by "posties" who were "blogging for dollars," I followed the referral links in Other People's Blogs and signed up for IZEA's PayPerPost and other similar services. I removed the "no follow" tags in my blog template so that my blogging friends could comment and get "link juice" back to their blogs. Within two weeks and before I knew what it meant, Google had "spanked" me and reduced my PageRank to a big fat zero. The Catch-22 is that, even though my RankSpank had been caused by the paid posts, the paid post advertisers were less interested in my rankless blog and I had fewer opportunities.


IZEA RealRank to the Rescue!

IZEA's RealRank is the first site ranking service that focuses exclusively on measuring the traffic and influence of individual blogs throughout the blogosphere. The service is designed to help advertisers analyze the relative reach of blogs and make informed online advertising purchasing decisions in the long run. This approach made a great deal of sense to me based on my pre-investment banking market and media research background. RealRank aims to replace historically unreliable influence indicators such as Google PageRank and Alexa by providing more accurate statistical data collected directly from the source.

While other services report rankings based on traffic sub-sampling, inbound links and external data, RealRank utilizes the IZEA Toolkit (ITK) to provide real visitor data collected from a piece of code blog owners like me embed on their blog. (Proud Blogger Note: See the colorful RealRank badge in my sidebar? Today it says 380 and my rank is only getting better every day.) The data is used to define an individual blogs overall standing relative to other blogs participating in the program as well as in specific categories such as entertainment and technology.

Unlike other ranking systems, the RealRank scoring algorithm is public. The system weights blogs 70% on daily unique visitors, 20% by daily active inbound links and 10% by daily page views as reported by ITK. Participants can choose to expose just their RealRank score or expand reporting to include other data such as pageviews and visits (Roxiticus Desperate Housewives have nothing to hide, so click on the colorful RealRank badge in the sidebar to see all my stats). This approach provides advertisers with the most comprehensive and relevant view of a blog's ability to meet specific campaign goals. RealRank is the first site ranking service that focuses exclusively on measuring the traffic and influence of individual blogs throughout the blogosphere.

Naturally, all of my fellow bloggers will want a colorful IZEA RealRanks badge for their blog. So go ahead, you know you want to...Get Ranked....and Sign Up and Get Your Own IZEA RealRank Badge!