A nosy peek into bloggers' PW stats

I admitted it before and I'll admit it again: I'm nosy.

Not out of curiosity or boredom, but I'm nosy in the same way a mother wants to get to know her childrens' friends and their families. I want to make sure I'm making the kind of alliances I think I'm making.

First I'll tell you how to look at Project Wonderful stats of other blogs, then I'll tell you why you may want to do this yourself. If you're offended, I'm sorry. Hopefully you'll understand when I explain why.

How to check stats of other bloggers:
Yes. You can do this even if you don't use PW (Project Wonderful,) and this info may be useful to you outside of PW. I'll explain why in a minute.

Find the PW ad boxes on the blog you're looking into. Click on the link under the ads as if you were going to advertise on the blog. This will take you to Project Wonderful where you can view the daily visitors and page visits for the past 30 days. If you scroll down you can see where today's visitors came from and where visitors came from over the past seven days.

Don't forget to count comments. Not every blog uses PW, and of course PW only shows the stats of blogs using them. If you're interested in the traffic for a blog not using PW, you can look at the amount of comments to get a general idea of their traffic.

• Does every post (or nearly every post) have comments?
• Are the comments a single conversation between two or three people or are there a variety of commenters?

I don't know what the exact stats are for the number of readers who actually leave a comment* but if you figure that a high guesstimate of 20% of a blog's readers will leave comments, then a blog with about 10 regular comments may have approx 50 regular readers. That's just to give you an idea as you peek through blogs.

*I searched but couldn't find a number. Anyone know what % of readers will comment on a post?

That's the how.

So...why do it?

Most of us bloggers have developed some solid business alliances (and yes, some have turned into great friendships.), either with other bloggers we visit regularly or with our own readers who leave regular comments on our blog posts.

When looking for a new business alliance, it's handy to know what kind of traffic their blog is generating so we know if this is a good fit for us. If a blogger puts the word out there that they would like donations for an auction or giveaway, you may want to know if this will put your product in front of 20 different people each day or 600 people each day. Since donating your item to an activity on their site is advertising for you, you want to get the biggest bang for your buck.

One last note. If you look at the PW stats and see a lot of visits from Entrecard, please keep in mind that Entrecard members visit a lot of other members' blogs, click on the Entrecard widget, then leave without reading any of the content. Stats showing hundreds of visits from Entrecard may not indicate a number of people who actually read the blog you're looking into, so I'd recommend subtracting the Entrecard stats from the overall traffic on that blog.

What do you think?
Do you look at stats of other bloggers? How do you use this information?

(And remember, all comments are do-follow, so your comment left here supports YOU.)

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