Case Study: Value-Based Blogging

Today I want to open up the guts of this blog and show you with stats and benchmarks the return of a value-based approach to blogging.

Value Analysis 1: Keep Your Retweets

A value-based blog doesn’t need lots of retweets to get engagement. My number one metric of success is comments – the number of them, and the depth of them. That’s participation, not blind retweeting.

Value Analysis 2: Backwards Engagement

According to PostRank, 80% of conversations about content happen off-site. For my blog, 60% happen on-site. Value-based blogging is totally contrary to standard volume-based blogging. I don’t know of any top blog that gets more comments than retweets. Except, notably, Robin Dickinson’s.

Value Analysis 3: It Works

On an average of 10 tweets per post and 15 comments per post, this blog:

• Is in the top 5 for leadership on PostRank
• Is 2nd ranked for social business on PostRank
• Is in the top 200 marketing blogs on AdAge Power150

But more than these stats, the proof it works is that Like Minds works, that this community has changed lives, that authors have found ideas here and put them in books, and that people who commented here have gone on to do significant things together.

No blog post that received lots of retweets on my blog has ever had lots of comments. The two rarely coexist.