More Thoughts About HubSpot Website Grader

Just a few more thoughts about the HubSpot Website Grader. My good friend John at English Wilderness (and several other blogs) used the tool to grade all of his blogs, and got some great scores (see yesterday's comments). I congratulate him, and I'm not jealous, but now I am really curious! I also again ran across the site I first found with the grade of 99%.

One of the things they knocked my blogs down for was having too many pictures. So I didn't really question that, since I really like sharing pictures and I'm not going to stop. I put 1-2 pictures in each post on three of my blogs, and sometimes 4-5 in a post on My Quality Day. But the site that got 99% has lots more images than I do, and John's photo blogs all scored in the 90s, so that can't be my biggest problem.

I also noticed that the other site with 99% is hosted on blogspot, the same as mine. So that can't be taking off too many points.

I think that I should start adding metadata to my posts. Google doesn't use it any more (forthcoming post on that topic), but it can still be valuable for searches.

Well, as I said yesterday... this is one tool to help you analyze your blog or web site. I'd say that any score above 85% is pretty darn good. Of course, for those who seek to make serious money through a web site improving performance is always necessary.

Note a few hours later: Since yesterday I have made sure this site was listed at Technorati, and DMOZ. I added meta tags to the template. So I just ran the score again, and now this blog has dropped to 69% from 81% reported yesterday. This is very strange, and gives me a lot less confidence in this product.

HubSpot Web Site Grader

web ad income Oct 17 (4 blogs, 2 web sites, writing): Adsense $.20 Adgitize $.60 Project Wonderful $.03 Clixsense $.06 Chitika $.06 ______________________ Total: $.95

HubSpot's Website Grader

After seeing this logo on a blog, but with an astonishing grade of 99, I had to check into this.

HubSpot's Website Grader takes just a few minutes to analyze any web site. It then assigns a grade, much like being back in school and having your semester project subjected to the professor's red pencil. The score is returned with a full list of what features were considered, and, better than some professors, tells you how you could make things better.

Broad categories covered are On-site Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Off-site SEO, Blogosphere (recall that the grader can be used for any web site, not just blogs), the Social Mediasphere, Conversion of Visitors to Leads, and Competitive Intelligence.

If your blog is hosted on a site like blogspot, expect points taken off instantly, since those who want to seriously monetize their sites need their own domain.

One weakness of the system, which is really a weakness of social media in general, is that it gives a points for good rankings in Technorati, Digg, and del.icio.us. None of these sites offer a category that is a good fit for three of my four blogs. (This is really a rant that deserves an entire post, but if one chooses to blog about topics that aren't mainstream, it is extremely difficult to find others with like interests.)

One could argue that some of the means HubSpot uses to measure each category aren't complete or the best. Nevertheless, this is certainly an interesting tool by which to compare your web site to others. It also gives practical and specific suggestions as to how you can improve your score... and theoretically your effectiveness.

The best any of my blogs did was My Quality Day with a score of 87%. Some of the "problems" I may not be able to fix... such as poor categories in social media. I don't have much motivation to move it to it's own domain, but some of the suggestions would be fairly easy to follow.

HubSpot Web Site Grader

web ad income Oct 16 (4 blogs, 2 web sites, writing): Adsense $.02 Adgitize $.52 Project Wonderful $.02 Clixsense $.11 My Survey $.50 ______________________ Total: $1.17

How Did My Blogs Fare While I Was Away

I was asked in a comment to discuss what happened with traffic to my blogs and income while I was away hiking. I was away from blogging for the entire month of August Each blog had a message that stated that I was away and suggested that people play the scavenger hunt I had running on My Quality Day.

The results are actually quite mixed, so I'll discuss each one separately.

The blog Get Off The Couch News lost about half of its traffic. It is a long-established blog, with posts going back to June 2007. Quite a few of the hits there are on older posts coming from searches for specific topics.

The blog North Country Trail News dropped from an average of about 500 views per day down to about 200 per day. I was kind of disappointed about this. I did some promotion among trail people, and thought that would show up as a spike, but it didn't. This blog has been running since November 2008, not even a year yet, and its readership has tripled, but being gone for a month really hurt. I did manage to put up a couple of posts from the trail. It's coming back up, but I know I'll have to demonstrate a commitment to good articles. It's something of a niche blog anyway, so I don't expect it will ever have a huge readership.

The blog My Quality Day suffered the least. Of course, this is because I had posts scheduled that went up every other day with the scavenger hunt clues, and I managed to add a few "live" posts from my hike. Nevertheless, my Alexa rank there had risen to 81,xxx, and now it has fallen to 91,xxx. Still, that's under 100,000, so I can't complain! Views had been averaging about 1000 a day, and dropped to about 500.

This blog, Just Throw Money, suffered the most. It is the newest, and the traffic dropped off to almost nothing. I can understand that, but I'm trying to build a readership here too. The premise here is, can a blogger make money without signing up for thousands of sleazy offers, schemes, and time wasters. The verdict is still out on that.

So what happened to the income? It pretty much dried up. All the sites where I need to do something to generate income were unattended. Even on Adgitize, I only managed to click ads a few days. I made $6.94 in August, not enough to offset the $14.00 I paid to continue my ad. AdSense trudged along bringing in its two to five cents a day. I returned home in time to do what I could to gain income at Shared Reviews, but our earnings from SR for August haven't been posted yet. I expect to know that in the next couple of days, and am anticipating something in the $20 range. There isn't much of any way to compare this with a "normal" month there because they just came back to paying after a long hiatus. I did make $31.57 there in July, and it was just paid to me today. (But it's a lot of work for that money... yet most of these online earning deals take way too much time for what you get.)

My conclusion is that leaving a blog pretty much unattended for a month is really a serious wound. Not a death blow, but it can cause a lot of damage to whatever reputation one has built up. I wish I could have scheduled more posts ahead of time, but I'm right out on the edge of what I can keep up with to maintain four blogs, so it just didn't happen. I continue to try to maintain fresh content, without participating in weekly memes. I enjoy things like "Looking at the Sky Friday," and others, but my ego is large enough that I just want original content. We'll see if I can continue to deliver.

web ad income Sept 6 (4 blogs, 2 web sites, writing): Adsense $.04 Adgitize $.54 Project Wonderful $.05 Shareapic $.01 Clixsense $.07 Microworkers $.07 Textbroker $39.40 ______________________ Total: $40.19

What Constitutes a Successful Blog?

I am forever reading articles about how to make your blog a success. Very rarely do these articles define success, but for most of them, the implication is that success is equivalent to making money.

Certainly this is one possible goal for a blogger, but I think that there might be other very valid reasons to blog that have nothing to do with money, and the goals will have a strong bearing on how the author writes, promotes, markets, and monetizes his or her blog.

Here are a few possible reasons to maintain a web log:

• To make money
• To educate on a particular topic
• To promote a product or service
• To collect news of a particular topic into one location
• To promote a sense of community within a particular group
• To stay in touch with family or friends (similar to the previous goal but more personal)
• As a creative outlet
• As an outlet for one's own personal feelings and experiences.

In order to make money one must do a fair number of all the things that are explained on so many blogs- search engine optimization, discoverable titles, keyword density, affiliate marketing, advertising, and all the rest of it. Even though the stated purpose of this blog is to make money, each of my other blogs is maintained for one or more of the alternate reasons. I believe that these are just as valid.

To build a sense of community within a particular group it is really important to make sure that the members know about the blog, it might be less important to advertise it to the general public. How would success be measured here? Perhaps by the number of comments, participation in polls, percent of members who know about the blog, and consider it essential to being "in."

If your blog is a creative outlet, discoverable titles may feel like a death knell. There is nothing catchy about a title such as "Ten Sarcastic Reasons to Bathe the Dog." Something like "Don't Break My Flea Soap Bubble!" won't help the SEO, but may make you much happier.

To promote a product or service, SEO may be very important, but revenue generation is deferred by one degree. The blog itself is probably not expected to make money. However, the quality of the articles might be even more important than in other blog styles.

This post is not meant to be a definitive statement on all the reasons one might choose to blog, but only to point out that there are several valid goals.

If making money is your goal, I would suggest that you consider the ethics of the many options available to help you rake in the cash. The number of pyramid schemes, rip-offs, shady deals and scams is amazing. Freedom without responsibility is anarchy.