Alexaholic Shows The Value of Blogging
I was trying to explain to a friend of mine the value I get from blogging. Like me, he’s the CEO of a small tech company here in the Ottawa area. His company has been around a lot longer than iotum, though, and hence should be more well known. It’s not. I stumbled on a very convincing tool to show that — alexaholic. Alexaholic lets you compare the alexa rankings of up to five URLs at once. Here’s what I showed him:
The red line is iotum.com, and the green line is saunderslog.com. iotum.com is also the host of iotum’s corporate blog, simplyrelevant.com. Simply Relevant’s results are therefore included in the iotum results. The blue is his (unnamed) company. It’s pretty striking. His company has a well populated web site, with lots of product information. Graphically, it’s eye catching. And regularly they spend money on SEO. Yet their rankings are dismal. Their best days are days when they have news. Even on those days, we get 10x the reach he does, without doing any of the things they do. Why?
Part of the explanation is the DEMOgod award we won in February (that’s the big spike early in the month). The other part I put it down to blogging, but have had trouble explaining it. Blogs tend to have more indexed pages than static sites. Blogs also tend to have more links (in, out, and between pages) than static pages. Both of these dramatically increase your rankings on the major search engines. You’ll also notice that iotum and saunderslog have similar spikes of activity. Both blogs are deliberately cross linked, in order to create traffic and links between them. Our pages are getting reasonably constant traffic as a result, while my friends pages get small spikes in traffic only when his company puts out a press release.
The counsel I give to any startup today is pretty simple. Skip building a corporate site. Build a blog.
March 30th, 2006 at 4:34 pm
That’s a great tool! (You’re missing the “c” in the .com) 8-)
May 22nd, 2006 at 10:51 pm
[...] My thanks to Alec Saunders and his informative article here for crystalizing the value of a corporate blog.  Although I had toyed with the idea of corporate blog before, I had always thought of it primarily as a way to share ideas with employees and customers.  It wasn’t until reading Alec’s blog that I started thinking of it as marketing tool as well. If you are into VoIP but not familiar with it, do pay a visit. The opinions and insight are well worth the time. [...]
June 19th, 2006 at 3:53 am
[...] My thanks to Alec Saunders and his informative article here for crystallizing the value of a corporate blog. Although I had often considered starting one, it wasn’t until reading Alec’s blog that I began thinking of it as a potent marketing and sales tool. Prior, I viewed blogs primarily as a means to share ideas with employees and existing customers. If you are not familiar with it, and are interested in VoIP, do pay Saunders Log a visit. [...]
March 28th, 2007 at 11:52 am
[...] interested in blogging likely because they’ve read posts like Alec Saunders ‘Alexaholic shows the value of bloggingâ€. which shows the blogging drives lots of traffic to his corporate site and his traffic is way higher [...]