Thank you to everyone who participated in our webinar this week. In particular, I would like to thank our guests:

• Aaron Schoenberger – Founder and CEO of the Brainchild Group – @TheSchoenberger
• Angie Nelson – Virtual Assistant and Author on The Work at Home Wife – @thewahwife
• Gini Dietrich – Founder and CEO of Arment Dietrich Inc. and Author of Spin Sucks – @ginidietrich

It was an absolute pleasure to have these individuals talk about their experience with blogging and PostRank Analytics. In my opinion, their thoughts and insights made this our best one yet! If you missed it live, you can watch a recording of the webinar here:

PostRank in the Real World: Community Stories from PostRank Inc. on Vimeo.

Questions from the webinar

Q: What other social media measurement tools for the panelists use in addition to PostRank and how do they integrate them?

A:

• From Aaron – Klout – I find that the tool is useful for understanding your authority on Twitter.
• From  Angie - Klout – I find that PostRank works better for my needs time-wise.
• From Gini -Google Analytics – I use Google Analytics and PostRank together.

Q: What are a couple of the main criteria you use when deciding if blogging is a good strategy for their business?

A:

• From Gini – If the client is looking for things like thought leadership for an individual, credibility for an organization but they have a strong spokesperson or personality that can manage the process or if they are looking for things like speaking engagements or bi-line articles, things like that, that is when we would typically recommend blogging. It depends, some clients want to blog but don’t have anything to talk about so we don’t recommend it.
• From Aaron – I agree with Gini. For a lot of clients its good for them. Sometimes they don’t have the time or the manpower. If the resources and information are there than blogging can be an excellent tool for clients.

Q: Can you give an example of time when tracking engagement lead to developing good new relationships with clients, customers, partners, etc. or strengthened existing ones?

A:

• From Angie – PostRank shows who the ‘big players’ are in your network. Once you take that information and start engaging with that person, that little share becomes a bigger share and they start promoting your work more. Sometimes its hard to see that depending how they tweet, but when I can go in ans see that this person is sharing a lot of work and they have a big network, that is something you can really begin to leverage.

Q: Which additional sources of engagement would the panelists suggest be included in the PostRank algorithm?

A: We currently collect data from over 20 different social networks and hubs. You can find a complete list of all our engagement sources here.

• From Aaron – No suggestions. It has everything we need. Most of the things we track are social bookmarks like Digg and Reddit, but primarily Facebook and Twitter.
• From Angie – I love Stumbleupon, but I already know that PostRank is unable to get access to this data. Other than that, it has everything that I need.
• From Gini – We use Livefyre for our commenting system and even though it syncs to WordPress comments which PostRank tracks, for some reason there is a disconnect so PostRank is not currently tracking our comments, which wouldn’t be a big deal if I weren’t trying to beat a few people in the AdAge Power 150. I’m just slightly competitive. So we’re not getting credit on AdAge for our comments and we get 100-200 comments a day. I would love to see that, but I know it is something PostRank is working on. It is a big thing for us.

Q: Has PostRank shaped the channels that you use to promote blogs through?

A:

• From Aaron – Yes absolutely. Before we would create a lot of blog content and spend a lot time sharing on every social site possible and then we realized that a lot of engagement comes from select sites. We started using those select sites to improve efficiency, just because of the engagement we receive from those sites. We still use a lot of the other social sites, but we don’t see as much value from them. That was something we were able to realize using PostRank.
• From Gini – Yes, this is exactly our experience. For one client, LinkedIn is huge for him and we didn’t realize that until we started looking at PostRank Analytics. One of the big things we started to push this client on was getting him involved in groups and discussions and things like that because we know from PostRank Analytics that a lot of his traffic is coming directly from LinkedIn.

Numbers, numbers, numbers. Every election brings a tidal wave of numbers for consumption and consideration. Major research firms regularly post polls on leader approval rating, voter intentions and other questions meant to gauge the thoughts and emotions of the electorate. In Canada, a country that spends more time online than any other nation, we responded to the evolving political campaign with tweets, comments and social bookmarks as we consumed and shared content online.

In this year’s election, PostRank began looking at social engagement with content originating from the major party websites a week after the campaign kick-off.  We shared that story in a blog post that featured an infographic illustrating the performance of content from party websites on the social web. We’ve updated that data and discovered that the Liberals and NDP continue to be leaders in utilizing their websites as content hubs that can effectively proliferate their messages across social networks. Both parties were able to create thousands of conversations in social media that included URL references to content on their site.

Of course, people discovered election stories, news and events from a variety of sources including: major news outlets, independent blogs and video. So we decided to broaden our search looking at stories and articles from these different sources online. This enabled the reconstruction of a timeline that plots out the development of the election using only data from social networks and hubs. We were able to find stories and events that generated major social engagement events and define the general trend of these interactions in order to make a non-trivial conclusion about the electorate’s behavior and its preferences in choosing election content online.

Analyzing this data revealed the following:

• The general trend shows that the number of social engagement events increased as the election day approached. Up and down spikes got smoother and the density of events grew.
• The overall character of the line is very relevant to the election’s development. All major events are reflected with spikes in the number of social engagement events a story or piece of news received.
• The highest point on the line marks the announcement of the elections. Canadians shared and commented on this news widely. The news was circulated actively abroad as well, in UK and Australia primarily.
• The lowest point, the end of April, was the Easter long weekend. Naturally the holiday distracted Canadians from election stories.
• Sharp drops in social engagement events with stories about the election happened on weekends. Canadians didn’t want to waste their time-off reading about election stories and events. However, weekend drops got smaller as the election day approached and so, people became more inclined to spend their private time sharing and commenting on news and stories about the election.
• Prominent spikes are located in the middle of the weekdays. On the one hand it is because this is normally when major news and events take place, on the other hand – it is also midweek when Canadians read their news in their workplaces, prompting them to share and comment on those stories in social media.

There is little correlation to be drawn here between the results we’ve come up with looking at social engagement with election content online and the results at the polls, let alone the ballot box. However, we have been able to demonstrate that there is a very clear connection between stories and events that unfold in the real world (for the most part) and the attention they get in the social web. This validates that social media is indeed social. We’re having conversations about the same things we do around the kitchen table as we do on laptops.

The explosive use of social media in conjunction with this year’s Canadian federal election campaign and coverage is unlike any before it. Since the election kicked off, we’ve been monitoring and measuring how people on the social web interact with content about the major political parties. Using precise URL-based monitoring techniques, PostRank is revealing, through a series of weekly blog posts on our Insights Blog, the ability of the parties’ messages to elicit tweets, comments, social bookmarks and other events by the social electorate.

“We’re all about social data at PostRank. When the election was announced, we couldn’t resist the opportunity to take a closer look at how the social web was responding to online content produced by and about political parties, their platforms and their leaders,” said Carol Leaman, CEO of PostRank, “We’ve discovered fascinating information that tells an interesting story about this election that you won’t hear from the pollsters.”

Recent data from comScore revealed that Canadians spend more time online that any other nation. Clearly, what is happening online during this election is of major interest to the political parties as well as the media covering the election. These groups and the electorate want to know how the use of social media is changing election campaigns and whether or not its influence is real. Using precise monitoring and analysis techniques, we can begin to get unbiased answers to some of those questions.

Focusing on online content – the articles and stories containing party messages about their platforms and leaders – we’ve pulled together a host of data. These metrics include the number of articles referencing party platform messages, the performance of these articles on the social web in terms of their ability to generate interaction and engagement, viral lift, and the reach of all this content across the social web. Each blog post we publish over the course of the election campaign will highlight these and other unique facets of data. Here’s a quick overview of the politically themed posts we’ve published so far – including a couple pre-election posts:

• Canada’s Tories Outnumber Opponents in Traditional Media Mentions
• Top 15 Shared Articles: The Reach of the Conservatives’ Platform
• Top 15 Shared Articles: The Reach of the NDP Platform
• Top 15 Shared Articles: The Reach of the Liberals’ Platform
• 4 Weeks to Canada’s Vote: The Party’s Reach with the Social Electorate
• Liberals are the Best at Reaching Canada’s Social Electorate
• Canada’s Election: Tories Lead in SM Numbers, Liberals Attract more SM Attention
• Canada Votes in 5 Weeks: The Parties Pitch for the Social Electorate
• Socially Famous Canadian Ministers: Lawrence Cannon, Stephen Harper, Tony Clement
• Liberal Party of Canada: The Most Social Canadian Political Party

Social media will continue to figure prominently in this, the 41st Canadian federal election. PostRank data speaks volumes about the effectiveness of the parties’ messages at engaging people on social networks and hubs.

Promotional support for this blog post has been provided by CNW.

CNW connects organizations to relevant news audiences through integrated, intelligent communications and disclosure services. CNW offers newswire distribution, social media releases, webcast, video, photography, translation, regulatory filing services and MediaVantage, a web-based media monitoring application, communications and workflow solutions. CNW has been an industry leader since 1960. www.newswire.ca.

Intuitively, it is also the case that certain types of interactions take more effort on behalf of the user and account for higher amounts engagement. Hence, when calculating the engagement score for an article, the PostRank algorithm takes these variables into account to produce a weighted score based on the amount and types of engagement.

Introducing the Actor

However, we also intuitively understand that not every tweet or comment carries the same weight. A retweet from Tim O’Reilly about your latest tech article is arguably worth a lot more than the same retweet from your friend with a much smaller following. In other words, knowing who the individual is that is performing the action carries a lot of useful information – information that PostRank, ideally, would take into account.

Well, the good news is, we are! Earlier this week we rolled out an update to our Metrics API which is now capable of answering exactly this question. Instead of simply returning the absolute count of events (delicious bookmarks, for example), it will also return a “scaled” value, which is computed based on each individual profile of the user performing the action. Check out our API docs for the detailed instructions and examples.

Under the Hood

It was a tiny change to our API, but one which required an immense amount of engineering and work on the part of our team. How do we weight the event based on the profile? Well, first, we had to build a system that is capable of constructing a historical activity profile for each active user across all of the networks we track.

Then we build a statistical model for each network, with dozens of attributes, which measures the user’s influence on that specific network. Finally, when a new activity comes in from a specific user, we look up their profile, compare them to our model, and adjust the engagement score accordingly. In practical terms, a vote from a Reddit power user will now account for much more engagement than a similar activity from someone who just joined the network — as it should be!

Getting Started with the new API

Best of all, this complicated data heavy lifting requires no work on your part. Simply query our Metrics API and we will take care of the rest. Or, if you’re using our PostRank API, then you are already enjoying the benefits of our new update — more accurate engagement ranking, improved relevancy.

As of earlier this week, we enabled this new weighted mode on the Metrics API for a subset of our engagement sources: Reddit, Delicious, and Hacker News. Over the course of the next several months, we will incrementally roll out the support for all of the remaining networks, as well as add this mode to all of our remaining APIs.

A seemingly tiny change to our API, but a giant step forward when it comes to measuring the engagement of the Social Web, and a great way to kick off 2011!

However, for those who are serious about gaining readership, growing their influence, and possibly monetizing their site, putting some thought into measuring how your content performs can help achieve those objectives by design, not by accident. That’s why a few weeks ago we introduced the concept of goal setting and measurement into PostRank Analytics.

Now, not only can you use Google Analytics to set your usual site goals, but we’re encouraging you to think about new goals in the context of active reader engagement with your content and measuring that at a deeper level.

It’s often the process of thinking about goals that results in insights because it forces us to prioritize what we value, how much, and why. When it comes to setting goals for the performance of your content, what’s important to you might be very different from what’s important to someone else and each of your goals has a value in relation to your other ones.

Of course, PostRank Analytics already enables you to benchmark your overall and story-specific engagement metrics in the social world with our engagement scores. Now you can augment that with monetary values assigned to additional objectives that you set in your Google Analytics account, which get automatically integrated into PostRank. Here’s some food for thought to get your creative juices flowing.

Perhaps as an author you decide that raising your personal profile and growing your influence is most important to you, while making money from your site is a secondary objective. After thinking about it you decide that the following things matter to you in descending order:

1. getting conference invitations and speaking engagements
2. creating evergreen content that audience members reference more than once
3. selling an e-book
4. keeping readers on your site as long as possible.

As it relates to your goals then, you might decide that each speaking engagement you land is worth $2,000. And you have intuition that creating a really compelling “About” page on your site is one key to converting those opportunities. But you also hypothesize that you need 100 visitors to your profile to close on one speaking engagement. So, you assign a value of $20 per visitor to your “About” page because it’s an indication that people are interested in who you are and what you’ve done.

In terms of driving loyalty and engagement with evergreen content, you might set two goals. You might decide to assign a value of $2 to each loyal audience member that you call an “Archive Reader” — people who visit some minimum number of pages on your site or visit very specific pages in the archive. They’re valuable to you because those individuals tend to have a stronger interest in your area of expertise and are possible fans.

Fans are important to you because they share your content with others and engage in related conversations. At the same time, you also might decide to assign a value of $0.50 to every visitor who looks at your archive list. They may not be fans yet, but they are looking for and are possibly more engaged in what you write about than people just interested in the latest news.

As for your e-book, it’s priced at $10 per copy. You might hypothesize that you need 50 clicks on the link to convert one buyer, so you assign a value of $0.50 for every reader who clicks that link.

Finally, since getting visitors generally helps with all of the above, you decide to create two more goals. The first is the “Reader”, or someone who spends 1-5 minutes on your site and is worth $0.10 to you. The second is the “Engaged Reader”, or someone who spends more than 5 minutes on your site at a time, and who is worth $0.25 to you.

Now you’ve got an overall plan with specific metrics related to audience behavior on your site, which will impact your influence and help you make money. Measuring your results over a week, a month, or whatever time frame makes sense to you will enable you to see what works and what needs to be adjusted. Iterate, play with the values, and drive the behaviour you want with your audience.

It’s simple! Going through the process of thinking about goals and what they’re worth to you means you’re over halfway to achieving them. Getting them set up and measuring results is the easy part, and PostRank is here to help!

To help you answer these questions, and more, today we are launching the Optimize section in PostRank Analytics!

Building on the Activity Streams functionality we introduced earlier, PostRank will now analyze all of the activity around your content on some of the most popular networks (Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Reddit – more coming soon!), identify your fans and influencers on each hub, and display their profiles! Within the same view, you can also learn how each network ranks your content, and how you can optimize for each to grow your audience and reach.

Sign in and learn about your influencers and how to optimize your social strategy, and in case you are not an existing user, the first month is on us!

Over 2 million web pages now serve up the PostRank Top Posts Widget each day (including this very blog). Today we’re launching a bigger and better Widget, exclusive and free to our PostRank Analytics community. It’s the Contextual Top Posts Widget!

(Doesn’t that just make you want to sign up for your free Analytics trial right now?)

Until now, the Widget has been designed to dynamically showcase a site’s most engaging posts overall. It’s fully automated. For sites where the Widget is installed, the PostRank system analyzes the publisher’s recent archive, and the same content is displayed on each page on the site. The Widget also has a search box so readers can find the best posts on a specific topic of interest on that site.

The new Contextual Top Posts Widget is much more powerful. It does what the regular Widget does, but also analyzes a number of external variables depending on how much information is available:

1. Did the visitor arrive from a search engine, and, if so, what were they searching for?
2. If the visitor did not arrive on the page via search, does this post the visitor is reading have keyword tags assigned to it?
3. If the post has no tags assigned, can a category or topic be inferred about this post from page content or URL?

So what does this do for visitors? Let’s look at potential scenarios…

A visitor wants to learn about a camera and googles “Nikon D90″. When the visitor arrives in the website with the Contextual Top Posts Widget installed, the Widget identifies the search query and searches the website for any content that mentions “Nikon D90″. Any matching content is then ranked by social engagement using the PostRank API, and relevant posts are then displayed on the Widget in order of overall engagement. It’s like a mini search engine for the visitor on the specific website, displaying all the “Nikon D90″ related posts, not just one.

or

A visitor arrives on a website to read an article, and notices an article about the Nikon D90 in the Contextual Top Posts Widget. The visitor has been thinking about buying a new camera, and so clicks on the Nikon D90 article link. If the page is using good markup, the Contextual Top Posts Widget will identify what that article is about, search the site for other posts about the Nikon D90, then rank matching posts by engagement and display them in the Widget.

or

A visitor is researching cameras and arrives at a website. Interested in the Nikon D90, the visitor realizes the site has a lot of excellent content about that camera, and clicks into the Nikon D90 category to browse the archive. The Widget will detect the category topic, search the site for all the posts about the Nikon D90, rank matching posts by engagement, and displaying them in the Widget. The visitor can now see all the best content about the Nikon D90 at a glance, thus saving time instead of aimlessly browsing.

In our testing we determined that the system can almost always find information based on one of these scenarios. However, if not, the system will revert to standard Top Posts analysis and display the website’s top posts overall, regardless of topic or category.

Activity, interaction, and engagement on the web continues to get more targeted. Augmented reality, geolocation, more niche blogs and communities. At the same time, the amount of sheer content continues to explode. More people, more apps, more posts, connections and status updates.

The Contextual Top Posts Widget helps pare down that fire hose of information to help visitors to your site find and read exactly what they’re looking for. The results:

• a more valuable experience for the visitor
• higher pageviews for publishers (anecdotal reports)
• renewed exposure for archive content after its front page debut
• a stronger connection between visitors and the publisher
• a much higher likelihood that the visitor will return to the site in the future.

Sign up for PostRank Analytics today and not only get the best social engagement analytics for publishers (free for the first 30 days!), but also get your Contextual Top Posts Widget and help your audience Find and Read What Matters.

Once you’re signed up, just click on the Contextual Top Posts Widget banner to customize it for your site. Setup only takes seconds!

We think they’re pretty engaging folks, and we think you’ll think so, too. And hey, if you think you’d make a great featured blogger, drop us a line and let us know!

To kick things off, we’re starting with one of our most lively engaged communities — the wine bloggers. These folks are active, supportive, knowledgeable, and really friendly. We selected Tom Wark and his Fermentation blog, which won the Biggest Mover & Shaker honours in the Wine category in our 2009 Top Blogs. Tom thoughtfully and astutely answered a few questions for us, and so, on with the show!

PostRank: You cover a wide variety of topics, from profiles/interviews to legal issues in the industry. Do you have a specific map or strategy of what you want to write about, or is it more a case of what you’re currently finding interesting and relevant (or somewhere in between)?

TW: I don’t create a schedule for what will be published on FERMENTATION and I never have. In general, my readers see what is interesting to me at the moment. That said, the common thread is always wine and, because I’m in the wine business, there is generally a connection to the business of wine. There are, however, areas that I do like to cover on a fairly regular basis. I want to introduce my audience to really good wine bloggers so I try to do at least one interview a week with a wine blogger whose voice I find compelling. Beyond that, what gets written about is what’s on my mind.

PostRank: Your blog has been around since November 2004. What would you say is the most significant way it’s evolved or changed in the succeeding years?

TW: Structurally my blog has changed in order to accommodate advertising on it. That’s mean providing room “above the fold” for companies that want FERMENTATION readers to take note of them. Beyond that little about the actual blog has changed other than its increase in readers that have led to more robust conversations in the comments area.

PostRank: Do you think your professional expertise in public relations gives you an edge in building and promoting your blog and audience?

TW: At the very least I think my time working in PR has honed my ability to spot a promotional opportunity. More importantly, having something of a presence in the wine industry already gave me the kind of initial credibility that would lead someone else in the wine industry to look at my blog a first time. I’ve used the occasional press release to draw attention to the blog, too. Finally, I think my visibility with professional wine writers has led to me having more opportunities to be a source for stories about wine blogs and alternative wine media. This, in turn, has led to more promotional opportunities coming my way.

PostRank: The folks whose blogs are in our Wine topic are some of the most engaged, supportive, and active communities we have. Any insights into what makes wine bloggers a tight-knit group?

TW: Interestingly, the wine industry itself has been a very collegial one since I’ve been a part of it. It’s almost clubby. The Wine Blogging community has evolved to have a very similar quality to it. In addition, I think things like the Wine Bloggers Conference and the American Wine Blog Awards have inspired wine bloggers to watch each other more closely and to interact. This translates into support. Finally, what’s at stake in what gets written about is rarely controversial. Bloggers talk a lot about whether rating scales are good, whether there’s too much alcohol in wine, which wines they like and don’t, what events are worth attending, how social media affects the world of wine. It’s not like we are debating affirmative action or the merits of a bank bailout. I think the subject matter you find on blogs is such that it encourages support among bloggers.

PostRank: Do you find it easy to balance writing about your own experiences and interests with topics that are trendy or current in the wine world in general, or do you find that there’s a lot more fodder in one area or the other?

TW: Everything I write about is opinion. I rarely attempt to educate. And if it’s not opinion you’ll be reading on my blog, then you’ll be reading my personal account of my interaction with my own interests and life in general and how wine intersects with it. In the end, most bloggers will get to the “trendy” stories. Some are so juicy you can’t resist. When the Wine & Spirit Wholesalers of America announced that Sarah Palin will keynote their convention, well, it’s hard to resist blogging about that. But in general, what is on my mind in the morning is what gets written about on the blog, whether the subject is trendy or obscure. And I really don’t mind “obscure”.

PostRank: Gary Vaynerchuk’s Wine Library TV won the other two Special Mention honours in the Wine topic for our Top Blogs of 2009, yet he’s not consistently #1 in the topic. Do you think that’s because readers of wine blogs look for a fair bit of variety in their reading?

TW: Gary is a busy guy. New baby. New company. Books… and of course WinelibraryTV.com. If he isn’t #1 over at PostRank it’s because he has his focus on one of the many areas where he has interests. I think it’s pretty clear that Gary is the most watched, listened to and interesting member of the wine blog/alternative wine media world.

PostRank: Your blog, Fermentation, won the Mover & Shaker award, which means you had the highest growth in audience engagement in 2009. Did you start the year with an intentional strategy to grow your audience and engagement, or was it just a matter of working hard and writing well?

TW: I like to think it’s the latter, working hard and writing well. I take seriously the “Daily” in “Fermentation: The Daily Wine Blog“. I’m also blessed with the ability to write fast and organize my thoughts fairly quickly, so keeping up the “Daily” part isn’t has hard for me as it might be for others. I’m guessing the prolific quality of my blog had a lot to do with receiving the “Mover & Shaker” award.

PostRank: Any advice or encouragement to wine bloggers who are starting out or working on finding their voice or niche?

TW: Yes. If you want to start a blog to reach an audience beyond your friends and co-workers you likely will fail — unless you actively market and promote your blog and unless you write on a very regular schedule — numerous times per week. Also, it’s important for potential bloggers to answer the question: “Can I say something original that isn’t just my opinion and that has likely already been expressed by someone else?” If you can’t, then my advise is to stay a reader and not get into blogging.

And there you have it. Many thanks from the PostRank team to Tom for taking the time to engage with us. Head on over to Fermentation and let us know what the most interesting thing is that you learn!

Whether your favourite sport involves flying through the air or gliding down the ice, we want to help you keep up with all the best Olympic coverage with our Olympics 2010 topic. Want to know everything that’s going on, or are you just passionate about one sport? We have a big Olympic feed with all the sources we can find, as well as separate topics by sport.

Each day during the Olympics, we’ll be blogging from the podium, so to speak, presenting virtual gold, silver, and bronze medals in engagement for the previous day’s Olympic content. And after the closing ceremonies, we’ll be awarding overall bragging rights to the sites that garnered the most social media engagement from their audiences over the course of the 2010 Winter Games.

We’ve also put together an Olympic Twitter account and Twitter lists if you prefer your news and social interaction bite-sized. We have an overall Olympics list, and separate lists by sport. You can find those on our PostRank Twitter lists page.

But just like those Olympic athletes we’ll be cheering on, we can’t do it alone. We need your help to make the PostRank Olympic topics the best they can be! There are 15 sports in the Games, and athletes participating from over 80 nations. And let’s not forget the Olympic-related organizations, news coverage, and other commentary that’ll be going on.

There’s a lot of content out there, and while we’re working hard to gather up and organize as much of it as we can, collectively you know way more than we do. If you know of an Olympic athlete, commentator, news site, country’s team, or Olympic-related organization we don’t have in our topics or Twitter lists yet, let us know at olympics@postrank.com and we’ll add it right away. Content from outside North America is especially welcome. (It doesn’t have to be in English; it just needs to have an associated RSS feed.)

The 2010 Olympic Winter Games are gonna be great, and we don’t want you to miss a moment!

Make sure you’re included!

How Will the Rankings Work?

PostRank tracks reader engagement with content by measuring what happens with articles and stories. We monitor 20 social sites across the web where readers create, critique, chat, collect and click. For each engagement event a weighting factor is applied based on the level of engagement that event suggests.

Individual story engagement is then rolled up and a total engagement score for the site is used for the ranking. It’s a truly remarkable signal that indicates how engaging and influential a publisher is. (Learn more: About PostRank, About Engagement.)

Help Us Curate the Lists

To make sure our topics reflect the best publishers and content out there, we want your help. Every day we work hard to make sure we track the best quality and most engaging publishers on the web. But you, the actual members of these communities, can make sure we haven’t let something slip through the cracks.

Anyone can add new sites to our system. And any registered user can add sites to specific topics. Please visit your topics of interest and add the ones you feel should be there. Could be your own, or someone of whose writing you’re a fan. Let your communities know, too, so they can make sure they’re represented.

You can browse all available topics or search by topic name in the search field on the postrank.com homepage.

Adding a new site to our system is as easy as entering it into the search field on postrank.com. (Please note, however, that to be added to our system, a site does need to have a valid RSS feed.) To add an existing site/feed to a topic, you’ll need to create an account. Fortunately, that’s easy as pie.

Then you can use the search field to find a specific topic in the drop-down results — just start typing. Or select it from the All Topics page.

To Add a Site to a Topic

1. On the right sidebar of the topic page, click the Manage button.
2. On the Topic Management page, type or enter the new site’s URL into the Add Feed field. If it’s in our system, it will appear in the drop-down list.
3. If the feed isn’t in our system yet, just add it in the search field on the homepage, and it should appear in a minute or two.
4. Click the green plus sign button to the right of the site’s listing to add it to the topic’s feed list.
5. Click the Save Changes button at the top of the screen to save the update.

Voila! You’re done. To see where the new site is in the topic’s rankings, click the Feeds link in the right sidebar to see the topic’s full list of sites. If you have any trouble, let us know.

Find Out How You’re Doing Now

If you’re already in our system you might want to see how you’re doing in detail. Check out PostRank Analytics! Get a snapshot view of the last 30 days of your site’s engagement with the PostRank Analytics Tour.

And for 2010, keep working hard on creating great content, discovering where your audience is, seeing how they engage with that content, and growing your community and influence to make yours a Top Blog!

Resources

• PostRank Logo location: http://blog.postrank.com/images/PostRank_logo.png
• Top Blogs 2009 badge location: http://blog.postrank.com/images/topblogs_2009.png
• PostRank.com homepage: http://postrank.com
• PostRank All topics page: http://postrank.com/all_topics
• PostRank Analytics Tour: http://analytics.postrank.com/tour
• About PostRank: http://postrank.com/postrank
• About Engagement: http://analytics.postrank.com/docs/engagement