Best of Beth's Blog 2008: Finding The Top Ten Posts In Less Than Five MInutes!

One of the things I've been wanting to do for a while is review my blog content for the year and select the "Top 10" posts or the "best of" posts. Once a year in June, I do an overall benchmarking and ROI analysis of my blog using particular metrics.  But, a top ten post would focus on the content itself - and also jump start some thinking that I need to do for a redesign of this blog.

I use a variety of tools for this analysis, including Google Analytics, Feedburner subscriber counts, and manually tracking comment to post ratios (typepad doesn't have a nifty plugin like wordpress to automate that grunge work) 

A tool that use to evlauate my content is PostRank.   It takes your RSS feed and applies engagement metrics,  analyzing the types and frequency of an audience's interaction with your content.  Each blog post is given a score from 1 to 10, representing how interesting and relevant people have found your content. The more interesting or relevant an item is, the more work they will do to share or respond to that item so interactions that require more effort are weighted higher.

PostRank scoring is based on analysis of the "5 Cs" of engagement: creating, critiquing, chatting, collecting, and clicking.  It uses sources such as how many delicious bookmarks, incoming links, how many times mentioned on Twitter, how many comments, etc.

PostRank has recently brought back its "Top Content" widget"   The widget displays you top ranked posts over the last month or so.  (You can actually go back and review your entire feed.  I did this and noticed some posts from October that received higher ranks but aren't included in the widget.)

This analysis took all of five minutes.  Then I spent another hour going back through the 1,000 plus blog posts and pulling out those that scored in the "best range" which was 8, 9, or 10.

Scored 10

• How Much Time Does It Take To Do Social Media?
  
• Twitter As Charitable Gift Spreader
• Should There Be A Social Actions Category on Digg?
• How Long Does It Take for 250 Super Connected Gnomedex Geeks to raise $2,500 for Cambodian kids?
• Help Me Send Leng Sopharath To College in Good Health!
• Working Wikily: The Power of the Newbie
• Where Are The Gen-Y Bloggers Who Write About Nonprofits and Social Change?
• Thinking Strategically About Social Media
• Twitter Demographics
  
• Social Change Behind the Firewall
• Twitter is the Second Highest Referral After Google
• Arts 2.0 Examples
• Ten Web 2.0 Things You Can Do In Ten Minutes
• The Cute Dog Theory
• Pimp My Nonprofit Panel at SXSW
• Transparency and Social Media: Dealing with Criticism
• Interview with Jonathon Colman
• The Intangible Benefits of Social Media
• Reports of the Death of Social Networking for Nonprofits Are Not True!
• Harry: A Green Geek
• Online Fundraising Predictions From Around the World
• Thanks Teresa Crawford For Helping Us Swim Upstream
• Don't Let $50,000 for the Sharing Foundation Slip Away!
• Why Is Pharoth Wearing A Foo Camp T-Shirt?
• Social Media ROI: Compare With Paper
  
• An Internet Lesson in Rural Cambodia
• You're Never Too Old To Change the World
• Success Metrics for Your Social Fundraising Plan
• Donor Solicitation Techniques on Twitter
• Sharing Foundation Has Supporters in Finland
  
• Blogging Behind the Nonprofit Firewall: ROI Approach
  
• Social Fundraising: Leveraging On and Offline Connections
• Calling on the Twitterverse and Connie Reece Answers First
• $10 will help a Cambodian Youngster Get A Better Life
• Why Nhung Sun, A Cambodian Blogger, Supports The Sharing Foundation
• Bloggers Who Create Community Award
• New Year's Resolution: Do Something About That Pile of E-Waste
  

Scored 9.0-9.9

• Micro Fundraising and Trust
• If your organization Tweets, will they donate?
• Social Networking: Part of Your Job or Just for Fun?
• Your Organization's Social Networking Strategy Doesn't Have To Be Like Mastercard
• Prioritizing Your Web Strategy Budget:  What Slice of the Pie for Social Media?
• Social Media In An Economic Downturn
• Microblogging in a Museum Context
• The What, Why, and How of Facebook Fan Pages
• Gnomedex Real Time Fundraising Experiment
• Online Community Engagement Strategies
• Vote for All These Awesome Nonprofit Panels At SXSW
• Measuring the Value of Your Blog
• What's the sweet spot between personal productivity and social productivity?
• Information Coping Skills: Turn off the damn computer and go for a walk
• Organizational Versus Personal Voice on A Blog
• How To Share the Social Media Workload in Your Organization
• Twitter on Paper Icebreaker
• Nonprofit Blogging Policies
• The Kids in Cambodia Say Thank You
• Graphing Social Patterns:  My Slides
• Giving Good Poke
• America's Giving Challenge: We Came In First!  Thank You
• Effective ROI StoryTelling Techniques
• Social Media Metrics: Distributed Influence
  
• ROI: You Can't Quantify Love or Can You?
• Using Metrics for Continuous Learning
  
• You're Not Going To Ask Us To Give You An Outhouse for Your Birthday?
• Birthday Greeting
• Beth's 51st Birthday Challenge
  
• Is Facebook Causes A One Night Stand?
• Harry's Fundraising Video
• How Do Social Networks Incorporate the Ladder of Engagement
• Spell my Twitter Name Correctly
• Intergenerational Wired Fundraisers: A Conversation

Scored 8.0-8.9

• How To Think Like A Nonprofit Social Marketing Genius
• Be A Voice for Darfur: Great Example of A Multi-Channel Campaign
• Social Media Breakfast:  Help Leverage A Tyson Foods Donation
• How To Set Up A Listening Post on Twitter
• Fighting for the Arts With Social Media
• What Color Is Your Nonprofit's Blog?
• Teaching Your Kids About Philanthropy
• Microblogging Reports Worth Your Attention
• E-Metrics Panel Presentation
• Blog Action Day: Can One Person Make A Difference
• Information Coping Skills: How Information Overloaded Are You?
• BackType: Another Listening Tool
• Twitter Isn't Pointless, It's Pointilism
• Working Wikily: The Secrets of A Wiki Gardener
• The Best Free Sources of Social Media Audience Research
• Advice on How To Not Pitch Bloggers
• Let the Change Blogging Meme Hit The Road
• Tips for Using Your Social Networking Presence for Professional Networking
• What Happens When You Treat Social Media Like Communications Media?
• Walking the Line Between Social Media and Old Skool
• What is your blog conversation strategy?
• Social Media ROI Case Study Slam
• How Nonprofits Can Get The Most Out of Flickr
• Eight Secrets of Social Networking for Nonprofits
• Social Media: Start With A Proof of Concept Pilot
• You Can't Quantify Love
• ROI and Nonprofit Technology Presentation
• Twittering and Forgetting
  

Tony Karrer suggests also looking at the number of views and delicious saves, so will do that in the next day.  And, I love Sue Water's just picking your favorites without looking at the stats. 

See also:
Are you tracking your top ten posts from Wild Apricot Blog
Life is One Big Top Ten by Sue Waters
E-Learning Today by Tony Karrer

Comments

[Sue Waters]

I also use Postrank to analyse my blog post but it was much easier when they were AidRSS to see how each post was ranked. Would like to know more about the formula they are using to rank the posts.

For example when you look at the posts on The Edublogger that ranked 10 these were mostly posts with very high comments. For some of these posts having a high number of comments doesn't mean they are great posts. Whereas twitter links appears to be important for ranking on your posts.

So I decided to use PostRank but stick to Tony Karrer's method of number of delicious saves as an indicator.

[Melanie Baker]

Hi Beth -- Thank you for helping spread the word.

I can never reach everyone, so it's always amazing to see publishers not only using the tools, but helping others understand how they work and how they can implement them in ways that are valuable to their blogs, projects, and businesses.

Also, congratulations on having so many top-ranked posts!

[Matthew Cornell]

Hi Beth.

> This analysis took all of five minutes.

What would really help would be instructions on how you actually did this, so we can re-create. Thanks.

[Matthew Cornell]

I found how to do this (didn't see this in your post): Create postrank account, add feed, wait for import, click add widget, change # of posts, and copy/etc. Thank you.

[Matthew Cornell]

Here's my little follow-up. Thanks for the idea!

[Matthew Cornell]

(Crud - the last didn't go through.)

Here's my little follow-up. Thanks for the idea!

IdeaLab 0105: Top 15 Posts According To PostRank
http://matthewcornell.org/2009/01/idealab-0105-top-15-posts-according-postrank.html