February 4, 2009; Vol. 3, Issue 2

We don’t know anyone who isn’t thinking about how to tighten up their strategies to be more efficient, retain the business they have, and get a foot up in the new business arena. And of course, we’re all busier than ever keeping the current work going.

This issue, we have a few ideas for you to see how you are measuring up to your competitors. (Or how your clients are measuring up to theirs!) And if we must say so ourselves, we think they’re kind of fun, too. Well, fun in that quirky geeky sort of way.

Are you engaging?

PostRank is a really cool service that will score and rank any kind of online content, such as RSS feed items, blog posts, articles, or news stories. PostRank is based on social engagement, which refers to how interesting or relevant people have found an item or category to be. Examples of engagement include writing a blog post in response to someone else, bookmarking an article, leaving a comment on a blog, or clicking a link to read a news item.

Do I have your attention?

Use AttentionMeter to compare traffic graphs from Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast for any website you’re browsing. Firefox and Safari and IE users can add this way cool service to their toolbars, too.

Is your site readable? Are your competitors’?

Curious about how complex your documents or Web pages are to read? You don’t have to get a team of experts to generate your readability score; you can use readability.info. It will analyze the characteristics of your writing and show you a variety of scores.

Turns out our web page is written at the 5th grade level. (I promise that my 5th grader did not write it.) What I did like is that 48% of our sentences are short and 10% are long and the average length is 12.1 words. We like to mix it up like that.

Seriously. How many people really do go to that website?

So these folks at Statbrain did something that rocks our world. They combined all the statistical, visitor, traffic information they could harness using it to estimate how many visits a site has (and other great info, too!).

Need help?

Our team of researchers is available for small and large projects. We know many of you are overextended, so if we can help, just give us a call.