WebProNews

One of the questions I am asked most frequently is: "What is the best way to date to gauge the influence/impact of a blog".

Others cite Technorati's link statistics or Google's page rank, but as a communicator is there any existing way to truly gauge the readership of a blog?" Today PubSub, one of my clients, took a big step towards solving this problem by introducing a powerful new tool that allows you to track a blog's in-bound links over 30 days. You can also use it to measure in-bound links to any web site - not just blogs.

While LinkRanks don't measure a site's audience, they measure the importance and number of recent in-bound links - which usually directly reflects a blog's readership. A LinkRank is a calculation of a site's current ranking among all of the blogs PubSub tracks - which right now hovers above seven million blogs. You can read more over on BoingBoing, the number-one-ranked blog in PubSub's database. Currently, my site ranks at #379 (the lower the number, the more influential the blog). You can view a list of the top 100 sites here. Bookmark this page and keep it handy the next time you want to measure a blog's influence. All you need to do is enter a blog's URL.

Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Senior Vice President with Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.