The Real Estate Blog Traffic Challenge - Calling All Bloggers

I know the argument, traffic is not important; show me the leads! 
Nonetheless, the real estate blogosphere is proving to be a competitive place, and it is inbound traffic counts that are fueling the fire. 

Whether you are comparing your traffic with your peers or competing against yourself, the bottom line is, we all need a common ground and a common metric with which to compare our visitorship.  Otherwise, numbers can be pulled from anywhere with claims of accuracy.

The need is to have everyone using the identical 'unique visitor metric'.  That metric should be BlogTopSites by BlogFlux. 

How BlogTopSites Works:

“Ranking of pages is done according to the number of unique visits each blog receives every week. Advanced anti-cheating measures are undertaken along with manual checking to ensure no cheating occurs.

Our back-end has been custom built from the ground-up to be able to sustain high load and throughput.

At the beginning of each week, we reset everyone to zero. This helps keep the playing field even and allows new sites to make an impact on the rankings quickly.”

What BlogTopSites offers is an environment where we can clearly see where we stand in relationship to all other participating blogs.  There is no guess-work, no definition obscurity and no rumor. 
Black and white; where do you rank?  

Google Analytics, Mint, Sitemeter and BlogTopSites all seem to be more-or-less in accordance with the numbers they deliver, leading me to recognize the validity of their results.  Only BlogTopSites allows us to compare our traffic with the community.

Alexa and Compete offer clearly inaccurate results.
Webalizer numbers are off the charts.
And, proprietary systems that have unique metrics can not be leveraged by the entire community, and therefor unsuitable for objective measure.

This challenge is for all blogs to participate: ActiveRain Blogs, Tomato Blogs, Point2 Blogs, Typepad Blogs, WordPress Blogs, Blogger Blogs… If you have a real estate industry blog, this challenge is for you.

How easy is it to add BlogTopSites to your sidebar? 

1. Register Here
2. Then navigate to the Control Panel
3. Look for ‘Top Sites’ and “Set” your blog to the category: Real Estate
4. Copy the HTML they provide after setting your category.
5. Paste the HTML into a sidebar or footer of your blog.
6. Wait a few days and your Chiclet will start to give you your rank number.

Not sure how to access that area of your blog? 
Leave a comment, we’ll walk you through it.

If you have a proprietary blog, and don’t have access to the code in your sidebar, just ask the company that built the site for you and I’m sure they be happy to add the code for you.

Challenges with the Blog Traffic Challenge:

1. Not all sites have an interest in publicly measuring their traffic, so the list will always be incomplete. 
2. Not all sites will have the same chance at competing based on:
-Location
-Focus of Content
-Frequency of contribution (# of contributors)

If you aren't going to going to appear competitively (in the first few hundred) why should you still embrace the challenge?
 
1. To measure the growth of the RE.net community.
2. To have a metric for your own understanding of your traffic growth analysis.
3. Measure yourself against other blogs in your immediate area.
4. Learn of other blogs that are also concerned about the validity of their traffic metric.
5. SEO growth for the inbound link from a huge directory with limited links per page.
6. Exposure in the search engines – your description has some serious leverage.
7. Exposure to the community.

Tags: BlogFlux, BlogTopSites, Real+Estate+Blog+Traffic

Comments

[Carlsbad Real Estate]

Great suggestion--and a reminder to follow up with BlogFlux for San DiegoPreviews.

Regardless, I think there is much to be gained with transparency and common means of measurement. Far too much energy has been wasted arguing about the values of apples and oranges.

I'd rather be selling real estate.

--Roberta Murphy

[Stephen Wolfe]

I can get the chicklet on this site, but I'm not sure how to get it on my activerain account. Can you help?

[Jim Cronin]

Stephen,

I have to run to Austin to speak at MegaCamp for Keller Williams... but for a quick fix to your questions about adding the chiclet to AR, check our John Lockwoods's post on how to add MyBlogLog to AR. Follow along with the instructions above, then take the code and add it just as John explains in his tutorial.

http://activerain.com/blogsview/120034/Installing-MyBlogLog-Tracking-Code

[Sacramento Real Estate]

Jim,
I know you will be GREAT at the Keller Williams Mega Camp. We are all so proud of you, and the man that you stand for with character! Hurry home!

Good challenge for all and one that is not screwed.

-Gena Riede

[Lisa Dunn]

It would be really interesting to compare only consumer related sites to one another. It seems the real estate industry sites focused on us real estate bloggers would naturally float to the top. Your thoughts?

[Brian Miller]

Jim,
I agree...my blog has the site meter but honestly I haven't had too much time to monitor it... this will help me understand all this page rank stuff a little better...

[John Lockwood]

Jim, thanks for the plug on my tutorial.

I do object to the organized metaphorical ___ing contest, however, much as one could enjoy the real thing since it involves standing in a drunken line in the snow airing one's equipment, which is always worth considering on first principles.

We just got finished with everyone declaring Boardman the blogosphere's most successful salesperson on Sellsius. That was fine, no one had to do anything for that, including post any numbers proving that Boardman was the most successful salesperson. All it took was a declaration, which actually was a better contest than this since it didn't slow anyone's blog down.

Now I have to play this game or Gena Riede's going to be "the most successful real estate blogger in Sacramento", which means that in order not to lose I have to accept the principle that Jim Cronin has the right to specify which code goes on my blog. It's slowed down enough already displaying my company's listings, the last thing it needs is another DNS address to resolve, more Javascript to go fetch, and another call to someone else's database that may or may not be up.

Is this enterprise really so bereft of inherent profitablity and intrinsic joy of creation that we have to continually declare a winner so we don't collectively feel like losers? Why not just create something of value and win that way?

But in the end, this is real estate. We have photos on our business cards, but nobody fills out the disclosures correctly. Paper beats rock. Appearences beat substance.

[Jonathan Dalton]

I do wish BlogTopSites reset monthly rather than weekly. There is nothing that will kill the ranking faster than not posting on a Sunday (or worse, not posting over a busy weekend) and then trying to dig out of a huge hole for the next several days.

It can be done but it's rare.

[Elizabeth Weintraub]

I'd love to put this widget back on my blog's homepage, but About.com won't let me play with you. It claims this widget is inaccurate and misleading, and not because of unique visitor ranking, either. I would guess it's the Pageviews that About.com says are low. But what do I know? I have no idea how these dealiebops work.

[Joel Burslem]

I love the idea of having a single measurement for all RE blogs. Unfortunately, I'm gonna have to give the big thumbs down to the Blogflux chicklet. I had it on my blog a while ago and found it significantly slowed down my site. Anytime you put external hosted code it can bog your site down and this one was particularly bad in my experience.

[Todd Carpenter]

BlogFlux was killing my site speed as well. MyBlogLog is unfortunately doing the same, so they are about to go as well.

[Tom]

Blogflux code can bog down, what I have learned is to have it on the page but low enough in the code that if it acts up it does not get in the way of your content loading.

Here is a free tip and a great site for when your site is loading slowly, Octagate Site Timer. It will show you how fast all the elements of your page are loading and where the bottlenecks are. Sometimes you put up an image and it is huge but the code shrinks it slowing your site down, or widget code to another site has hit the fan.

Here is the link for Octagate. http://www.octagate.com/service/SiteTimer/

Now we need the white hat RENet to get all those bubbly bloggers off of the top of the blogflux list. :)

[Toby Barnett]

But it seems to me that these metrics are more designed for the blogger, the age old: my blog does more traffic than your blog.

I do understand the value of gaining more statistical data on a blog to evaluate traffic but just to be used as a competive tool for bloggers doesn't pose much value in my opinion.

[Justin Smith - CREN]

I second that Todd. I'm totally sick of the Bubble blogs. Too much negative energy... but that's what alot of people like I guess.

[Steve Belt]

Thanks a bunch for the blog ranking list. This list looks far more comprehensive than a list I was previously using, and while I expect really low ranking right now (my blog is only a week old), nothing gets me working harder than trying to improve my rank.

[Dan Hamilton]

Jim....Great job today at MegaCamp. Thanks for coming and sharing.

[John Rey]

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