I was asked to work on a small project for a friend. He just launched a new website and wanted to find the top bloggers in his subject so that he could start to follow and interact with them. My task is to find the top family or parenting blogs on the web and then find the demographic profile of those blogs.
I started on Technorati and they have a nice list of top family blogs broken out by influence. So I picked the top few and ran them through Quantcast to get a top line demo profile. Here is where the problems began. The low traffic volume of these sites either rendered them unreportable or threw off the indexes. If your intabs are too low something might index at 215% but that doesn’t really mean anything if the base is only 100 people. (Example, I think it’s slightly suspect that Age 13-18 year olds are 157% more likely to read a blog about post-partem depression)
What makes these “top” blogs? I tried other searches and kept running into the same wall- sort of haphazard lists of “top” blogs but really with no rhyme or reason to them. Now, I know if I was in a situation where I could afford all sorts of analytics tools there is a much easier way to go about that. But I don’t have that option here.
So, my question is: Is there a free tool that rates categorized blog sites by traffic that I am not thinking about?
© 2010 Jessica Knobbe. All Rights Reserved.