Using Website Grader for Public Relations (PR)

I was talking to a couple folks who were asking my opinion of something today.  Let's pretend that your company had some reasonably interesting news to announce in a few weeks and you were working with your PR firms to see what blog to target for getting coverage of the event.

How would you decide?  Clearly you need to look at what blog you think you have the best shot at actually getting them to cover your story.  And then you also need to estimate the amount of exposure each blog would give you.

Well, I'll tell you how I would decide which blog would give me the biggest return for my PR dollar/effort - at least in terms of comparing the possible exposure.  You have to make your own estimate about your probability of actually getting each to cover you.  But, to measure the exposure, I would use the Website Grader free SEO / Marketing tool and run a report for all of the blogs that I was considering, and look at a couple key stats to give me a sense of the relative exposure.

Above are a couple key stats that I took from Website Grader Reports for a sample of four popular technology-centric blogs - TechCrunch, Read/Write Web, Scobleizer and Chris Brogan.  I also put in the stats for the HubSpot Blog for comparison.  Clearly TechCrunch and Read/Write Web will get you a lot more exposure than any of the others.

Traffic Rank - This stat comes from Alexa, and a lower number is better, since a ranking of 1 means you have the most popular site on the entire Internet.

Blog Rank - This stat comes from Technorati, and a lower number is better, since a ranking of 1 means you have the most popular blog on the entire Internet.  One note about this, Technorati relies mostly on links for the ranking, and from my experience they are not very good at finding links, and are also not smart enough to know when you have moved your blog to a new URL even if you use accepted practices and use a redirect.  But, this is the best data we have.