Oh, I’m so sorry about the mini-earthquake!! 🙂 I think that I sometimes just assume that people reading our blog are our target customers. (Which totally isn’t cool! Sorry! I’ll update my post with some additional info.)

Although, I will say that the ease of manipulating the numbers is a little disturbing (by just visiting your OWN site every day with the Alexa plugin installed, you can really impact your ranking by a lot).

I mentioned this to our head of marketing, who also has a streetstyle blog on the side. When she checked out her score, she found that she was pretty much non-existent, even though she gets a hefty amount traffic per month. Then she followed the advice of that one article that I linked to in the post, and she said her score became like 5X better in a matter of weeks…

But I doubt most people are doing that. 🙂

We’ve used all of those platforms in the past (and actually liked all of them)… but we’re targeting a very different group of people with our marketing efforts than the target demographic of our customers. (We’re targeting marketers while our customers are targeting bloggers in the lifestyle space.)

As I mentioned in my previous comment, we’ve landed on Moz and totally swear by it because of the tools that they give you for exploring what other people in your space are up to. 😉 There’s no reason to re-invent the wheel. And the Moz bar is awesome in general when vetting sites that you’re wanting to reach out to.

I really appreciate you commenting and letting me know!! And good call about the notifications. 🙂 We should add Discus instead of using the default squarespace comments.

Thanks for the elaborated answer. I have to say that the comments about Alexa really created a mini-earthquake here in the office, as many used to rely solely on it. I shared the article with friends.

BTW, it could be nice to insert a function that will enable to get e-mail alerts when a reply is posted to my comment. I didn’t notice your reply for 3 days and only accidentally came to check if there was any reply 🙂 Thanks!

Totally agree, and that’s the perfect summary!! 🙂

Great question!! I love Moz and that’s my tool of choice when doing our own marketing initiatives. All of those tools are good, as long as they work well for the particular space that you’re in. We’re targeting bloggers in the marketing space, so we have good luck with them.

We’ve seen though that companies targeting bloggers in spaces like fashion, beauty, and lifestyle (for example), don’t have receive very reliable results. Our platform is a little more geared towards the lifestyle verticals right now, so our blog posts are also a little more relevant to companies within those spaces.

Regarding our platform, we help brands find relevant bloggers to work with. We provide data about vanity metrics (like follower counts and traffic), but we also provide info about engagement, content, and product and brand mentions. Which makes it really easy for a brand to go in and target super relevant bloggers to work with, rather than simply relying on metrics like follower count and traffic.

Really appreciate your comment! And you’re right, the effectiveness of the platforms is a relative question. For some they are great, for others, not so much.

Oh, glad it helped!! And thanks so much for the nice comment! 🙂

Thank you so much for such an awesome comment!! 🙂 I’ve noticed that same thing (where bloggers have to constantly back up the reasons behind charging), and it’s totally not cool that they’re put on the spot like that. I used to run a quilt blog in the past… and just taking the photos would take me a few hours… then editing, and writing the post… proofreading. The whole process would usually be a day-long affair. So I was really excited to write about this payment situation… it comes up a lot, and its good if everyone involved starts out on the same page! 🙂