I agree with you there Nic. I saw my Amatomu ranking go from around 19/20 to 10/11 and then back up to 15 and then down to 14 … if you base your view of your blog on your rankings then you will never be happy. There has to be a more substantial reason why you blog. Figure out what it is and stick with that.

Melt: I am glad that I am not the only feeling pressurised by my ranking!! I think that if we can prolong the good content on our site that the rankings will improve, it will never work the other way round.

Paul: You watch your trackbacks too much!! :O) I agree, you need to substantiate in your own head your reasons for blogging. I think every blog is different. SA Rocks for instance has me approaching things much differently to this blog. It’s a good thing, but it’s tough in the same breath!

I put up the Amatomu ranking ribbon, because I was able to do that. I couldn’t get the darn “I love button” to display properly, so I gave up.

And then I wrote a post to myself on my fledgling blog the other day to remind myself why I’d started the blog.

Couldn’t agree more!

IRC: HAHAHA thats awesome, I hope your post to yourself solidified your desire to blog!!

Sarah: Glad you agree and hope everyone is still set on blogging!!

Nic: do call me IM

Well, not really. I’m still sitting here going, “I need to write a pic post about the book I’m currently reading.” However, work beckons… BTW I’m working from home a lot this year because I don’t waste time sitting in traffic, which eats up valuable daily deadline time… I’ve got the discipline down, mostly, but I miss interacting with people. Hence the blogosphere and instant messengers make the day more interactive.

Cash is king china, content is only there to produce …….CASH……..! Kidding (fuck I love being a capitalist)! Just remember one thing, why did you start blogging? A popularity contest, probably not……diary, maybe,……cause you in enjoy it and its an outlet, probably! Go back to basics, if its a chore or something you are doing to get your rating up, then quit now! When you write stuff thats close to you, your ratings will go up naturally cause its not forced and your readers wont feel like it forced. Oh, and try porn and swearing, thats bound to help things a bit! later, paddy.

Maybe not indeed! You’re hitting the nail spot on. I feel EXACTLY the same way! Well said.

Thanks Stii!! Glad you concur!

The thing is that not all blogs are completely self-indulgent. Some, like yours, are useful. So rankings on Amatomu and Afrigator are important metrics - a way of getting feedback.

A fave quote by Bob Parsons CEO of GoDaddy:
“I swear this is true: Anything that is measured and watched, improves”.

This is one of the important lessons of marketing: pay attention to the research and the numbers because there’s people behind those figures… otherewise you’re just wanking (which is okay, but not very useful to anyone but yourself).

Dave you have a good point, but not everything is about the marketing and success (I think?). Looking at my two blogs, SA Rocks I want to succeed because the message is important, the measures of success are important because I want the message to reach the people.

On nh.com I think that I would rather have 40 dedicated readers than pressure myself and watch the numbers… does that make sense?

Nic, Dave does make a good point, but I agree with you. I’d rather have a smaller number of dedicated readers which I write good content for and forget about the numbers. Eventually the numbers will grow by itself.

The problem with watching numbers is that it is like waiting for time to go by, the longer you wait, the longer it takes. You start to count the seconds and then time goes by s-l-o-w-l-y.

Same here, the longer you watch your stats on Amatomu, the slower you’ll see it climb.

Nick, I’ve noticed my ranking slip down too and initially it was depressing. But I’ve also notice my stats going up - six months ago, I typically had about 10 unique visitors a day, now I am averaging about 50. I put it down to the Muti/Amatomu/Afrigator factor.
I was on Amatomu early, and had a good ranking. I have slipped down considerably since then - mostly because there are a lot more blogs registered.
Also, I work full time and blog in the evenings - I suspect there are people with a lot more time on their hands to push their stats up.
But the competition has been good in that it encourages me to post more often, and to make my posts relevant and topical.

You’re right. I like to push a little with BBD because of the nature of the project. Bringing traffic to blogs is what a directory is supposed to do. The spillover to Firemind has been nice but I resist promoting it too much because it’s my place to play - not a job.

I find that I get traffic from SpicyPage or CBE when I submit posts. My hits shoot up and then level off again. I find some people at these blog-social-networking sites spend more time networking than blogging. That’s overdoing it.

Nic,

Do not get me started on this! I stopped subscribing to Muti, Afrigator and Technorati and Amatomu because of the competetiveness of it all. You posed a question about Muti which I asked back in 2006.

What narked me was when I posted what I considered to be a really good article and found I was receiving -1 kudus etc compared to a mediocre post by one of the elite that scored 3 kudus.

Same thing at Technorati. I blogged about it to and called it Rongarati (a play on wrong. Only last week did I get an answer to my questions about their ranking methodology and confirmation that my site is being spidered correctly.
They found and error that Wordpress needs to help me fix.

But back to being competative - stop reacting and ignore all others. I don’t give a toss about rank anymore.

I vote with my subscriptions and stop them as and when I think the site I subscribe to (ranking type sites) is getting absurdly biased to all others apart from the clique.

It applies to all sites that ‘offer’ rankings. Why do they offer rankings is the question to ask. I never thought or realised that blogging was a race to the top of some idiotic ranking poll!

Go Daddy can say what he wants - I do not for a seconf think that competition leads to quality blogging. It leads to more blogs to read but thay can be utter bollocks.

I improve my style and content because I want to, not because a ranking site dictates that if I blog about Marketing or Web 2.0, I will get a better rank. Screw them.

Hey. I kinda agree as well. I *just* started my blog and already I’m wondering if the blogosphere is one big circle-jerk. Obviously the more “hardcore” elite bloggers are going to be the ones setting up aggregators etc and ranking higher on them. I really am torn between competing for traffic, even though I refuse for now to put any ads on the site, and writing just for the hell of it and not caring if anyone reads it. At this point though I’m like counting each pageview kinda thing though. Your blog is at least competing in this competition since I came to it from one of the mentioned sites.

In setting up my blog etc I’ve come across so many blogs that are basically just about blogging and “monetizing” your blog etc. Nevermind all the websites someone designed to get traffic to them by giving you free advertising.

PS: The bottom right of your footer says “Justing”.