It has come to my attention that not every blogger knows about or uses PostRank.

My mission today is to change that!

You see, PostRank is one of the tools that AdAge uses to determine their Power 150. But, even if your goal isn’t to get into the top 10 (like it is ours – I’m not competitive), the information it gives you, layered on top of your Google analytics, helps you make extremely informed decisions about your writing, your community, your social shares, your geographic reach, and more.

So let’s take a look at the analytics for two blog posts that ran on Spin Sucks this week. The first is the one I wrote about online community and the second is the one Matt Royse wrote about how social is changing PR.

It gives you pageviews, how long a person spent on the page, “engagement” events, Twitter, comments, Facebook likes, Delicious bookmarks, and linkbacks.

Now, it’s not totally accurate (we’re still trying to figure out WTH is going on) because the online community post actually had 113 comments, 35 likes, and 98 tweets. And Matt’s guest post had 19 comments, 42 likes, and 269 tweets.

What it does tell us, as much as it really pisses me off (sorry, mom, for saying that, but it does!), people like to RT the heck out of lists. But what makes me feel better is they don’t comment as much on lists so I still win in the battle of content that makes you think builds trust (as evidenced by my 113 comments). I also win in average points per event. Ha!

You can also look at trends for a certain amount of time (I chose the past three months for this exercise).

And you can look at where people share your content the most (for the same time period).

Depending on what your goals are: Highly engaged community, lots of traffic, social shares, moving your content to other referral sources, etc., is what PostRank can help you measure.

All you have to do is go to PostRank, click on CONNECT in the upper left-hand corner, they’re going to ask you a bunch of questions about how you blog and what types of information is OK for  PR firms to send you (you have to do this because the service is free) connect your social platforms, add your RSS feed, and verify your site. It takes about 20 minutes and you, too, can have a ton of wisdom about your blog!

For us, you’ll likely see more guest posts that include lists, more information on how to keep your content and online life more private, more how-tos (like today), and I clearly need to take on Edelman again because that drives some serious pageviews! Don’t worry guys; I won’t do that (unless you do something silly soon). Instead I’ll do what my friend Doug Davidoff advises me to do from time-to-time and “get my enemy back.”

Gini Dietrich

Gini Dietrich is the founder, CEO, and author of Spin Sucks, host of the Spin Sucks podcast, and author of Spin Sucks (the book). She is the creator of the PESO Model and has crafted a certification for it in partnership with Syracuse University. She has run and grown an agency for the past 15 years. She is co-author of Marketing in the Round, co-host of Inside PR, and co-host of The Agency Leadership podcast.

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