Best Blog in Singapore? Most Read blog in Singapore? Best content or best SEO blog in Singapore?

So moons ago, another blogger talked about being the "best" blog in Singapore by mere data collection. When I say data I mean readership/web traffic. In a world where KPI and ROI is very important to most people, that is almost the best we can do.

You wanna be the very best? Come I clap for you. (Credit: http://edmwimg.wordpress.com/)

Read about my thoughts about being the "best" blog.

So months ago Mr.Style King was talking about his blog having abetter local rank makes more sense since our content are meant for Singaporean. His rank was 6,5XX back then. And currently he's Alexa rank is 9,5XX. Anyway for those who are not in the industry might ask what is this Alexa rank and why do we pay attention to it? Here's from their site:

Global Traffic Panel

Alexa's traffic estimates are based on data from our global traffic panel, which is a sample of all internet users. The panel consists of millions of internet users using one of over 25,000 different browser extensions.

What is Alexa Traffic Rank?

The global traffic rank is a measure of how a website is doing relative to all other sites on the web over the past 3 months. The rank is calculated using a combination of the estimated average daily unique visitors to the site and the estimated number of pageviews on the site over the past 3 months. The site with the highest combination of unique visitors and pageviews is ranked #1.

A website is typically defined at the domain level. For example, www.yahoo.com, omg.yahoo.com and news.yahoo.com are all treated as part of the same site, because they all reside on the same domain, yahoo.com. Exceptions are made for personal home pages and other hosted sites, for example beekeepers-cooperative.blogspot.com, which are treated as separate sites.

What is Alexa Traffic Rank in Country?

The country traffic rank is a measure of how a website is doing among internet users in a particular country relative to other sites over the past month. The rank by country is calculated using a combination of the estimated average daily unique visitors to a site and the estimated number of pageviews on that site from users in that country over the past month. The site with the highest combination of unique visitors and pageviews is ranked #1 in that country.

For more information : Alexa.com 

But why?

So why am I revisiting this topic? Because recently I'm doing some research about working with bloggers out of my radar, people who I probably need to pay with to engage because they are under certain contract as well as people who are from overseas. As far as I'm concern, readership and numbers are just a very very small part of your blog and I believe your attitude, your other social media platform's performance plays a very big part too. That's not all, and many other factors like targeting the right crowd, If you are pretty and have nice deep cleavage speaking the right language, brand image, have you worked with a competitor recently, ya dah ya dah, you get my point. (I hope) Thus, it puts me thinking again, where are these bloggers standing? Can they really help to bring my product across to the target audience I'm looking for? 

The Truth

is that nobody out there is honest about their readership/ranking and not just because they do not want to or wish to but also because it is almost close to impossible. For example, this blog of mine, I've sign up with Gushcloud that actually gives me a view of how much readership I get on their backend, Blogger.com has their own backend as well as google analytics and the interesting part is that none of these results matches. So how do I know where I really stand in this case? How does anyone knows? Does using words like "estimated" and "Approx" really help the case?

Ranking

So I guess that best way to "weight" everyone is to have a standard indicator. (Which is fundamentally flawed as well because certain blogs genre gets more readership by default because of SEO and the topics. What do I mean by that? Think about yourself, how often would you google search for "Best Cafe in Singapore" over a topic such as  "XXX Brand launches new shoes at XXX". You get the drift. I hope.)  Since I am talking about Alexa let's take a look at some of Singapore's more familiar blogs by local rank. 

The picture above shows Alexa ranking of local blogs. Bear in mind that Alexa's ranking take into consideration of the last 3 months. - Nov 13, Dec 13 and Jan 14. So does that means that for the last 3 months I was more "famous" than Xiaxue and qiuqiu? Does that means that if you have something to sell it would sell better if I cover it over Xiaxue doing it? Bear in mind, there are a lot of factors to this for example how often did they blog and what not isn't it?  

If you are interested in the Screen Shot of Alexa ranking:

My point...

I am not saying that my readership is better nor am I saying that I am more "famous". My point is that readership and ranking is really secondary and can only be used as a bench mark, end of the day it is really your objective of your campaign. Do not simply believe that a blogger or two can turn your business around. Always do an engaging campaign to generate sustainable buzz on the social web VS simply having small spike of buzz using bloggers to talk about your product or services. And if any agency or bloggers comes to you and tell you how much buzz they can create for your business, always make sure you do your own research to check if these people are worth it, do not buy blindly. 

SOCIAL MEDIA IS NO MAGIC.

If Social Media is Magic, I'm probably from Hogwarts too. 

Mr.Smith, Social Media was a shiny new toy, now that's not so shiny, you need a little bit more than just jumping on it to fully know it and use it for best results."