You’re probably wondering how can PR and blogger outreach people know your influence before they even talk to you. Well, there are a few sites out there that judge the audience and “reach” of your blog.
The site that many people will go to first is Alexa. The Alexa traffic rank compares your website to every other one online right now. That’s a lot of websites! You don’t need to install anything onto your website for this, but you can install the Alexa Toolbar (the Chrome plugin is a much neater way to keep track!) which will pay attention to the sites that you visit and take that into account when calculating the ranking of a website. Alexa is useful to compare blogs because it judges them all in the same way. It can give a little extra info about what kind of people are visiting your site, and what the top keywords bringing people to your site are.
Brands can also use Google Page Rank to check the status of a blog. The Google Page Rank goes from 1 to 10 with most blogs being around Page Rank 2 – 4. Again, you don’t need to install anything on your blog to get a rating, but it can take a while for your blog to get one (Bonjour, Blogger! was started in May 2013, and even now (Oct 2013), it still hasn’t been ranked.) You can check your ranking through sites like PR Checker.
Finally, there’s Quantcast. With Quantcast, you’ll need to install a little block of tracking code on your blog, and after a few weeks, you’ll find out some interesting information that you could use in your media kit, including what percentage your visitors are viewing your blog on a mobile device (useful if you’re not sure whether to implement a responsive design that will scale nicely to mobiles and tablets), what other topics your audience enjoys (which you could use to influence what sort of posts to do next!) and of course, the demographics of your audience.
These aren’t the only things that will be taken into account however – your social media followings will also help, so don’t worry if you’ve not got huge rankings at the moment!
