Thats Ranking for anyone shocked at the title
So what do I mean? Well as long term readers will know, some of my income comes from posts that have been requested by companies, looking for honest opinions from bloggers. Some companies want to draw in more visitors to their own sites, others are looking to improve their standings with the search engines for key phrases.
These companies want to make sure that only bloggers who have a decent amount of traffic take their opportunities - there is little point in paying a blogger to talk about them if said blogger only gets visits from their Aunty Dora once a week. In the past, the Alexa ranking system was used, however this is not an ideal situation, as the statistics are not infallible, and niche blogs can find their ranks disproportionately worse compared to those blogs that are more mainstream. The solution? Well, IZEARanks.com has come up with RealRank; all a blogger needs to do is insert a little snippet of script in their blog’s code, and the Izea servers will take care of all the back-room statistical number crunching. You end up with a rank that allows you (and any other interested parties, should you wish to allow them) to see how well your blog is doing (in terms of unique visitors) in comparison to others.
From this rank, you can see how you are faring against your competition, and perhaps use it to try out different approaches and subjects for your posts. If you find that talking about Welsh wool (on a knitting blog for example) suddenly creates a surge in readers, and that talking about darning needles seems to dis-interest, and therefore lose, your readers, you know what to concentrate on. I know that this blog is currently in the top 20% of those blogs that are within the PPP (PayPerPost) scheme, and so opportunities that are not available to less popular blogs are open for me.
To get an idea of the sort of information you can research, click the picture below to see a higher resolution version of the thumbnail. You will find a screenshot taken when I compared the RealRank fluctuations of three blogs over a period of three months.

PS The reference to going blind - the more I post (I’ve been a little slack so far this year), the more tired my eyes become - anyone whose mind was wandering elsewhere with the post’s title needs to take their mind out of the gutter