Let's continue with the questions you had for us. Warning for a long answer to one single question.
Q: On your "advertising" section you say: "They say this is the worlds largest and most famous independent sailing/cruising blog..." What does this mean and how do you know your blog is the largest independent sailing blog?
We have followed your world tour for a year now and wish to leave for a similar journey ourselves one day. i see you have done well in promoting your trip and the blog is a success, your ideas would be helpful as we too would like to set up a blog for our journey when we set sail. Thank you. /Phil and Susann
A: Many of you have wondered about what we mean with that, let me explain: When I say "they", I refer to the overall authority and popularity which this blog has on the world wide web, compared to other independent blogs. There are a few ways to determine your websites relevance and importance online. One and the foremost is to check how many visitors your website has, this is easily done with the various analytic and statistic programs that you can find online. We use Statcounter and this is what it looked like yesterday when I checked our traffic for the past 30 days.
As you can see we got a bit more than 104.000 unique visitors and around 187.000 visits between Dec 28th and Jan 27th. Usually we have around 120.000 unique visitors and 210.000 visits monthly but the traffic slowed obviously down a bit during Christmas and New Year as people been busy doing other things than hanging online. Should be back with 120k unique, or more, next month.
That's a fair amount of visitors, but how do I know that we have more than others, and that our blog is so "popular"? First you can register your blog in different blog portals where you can get an idea of how many readers you have in comparison to other blogs/pages (like this one where we are #1 of all sailing/boat websites worldwide). Numbers on these portals are never 100% accurate but gives you an overall picture of how you stand in relation to the other websites on that specific portal.
Second, and even more important, thing to do is to check your page rank which is Googles valuation of your website. There are many blogs which has many readers, but your Google authority and your popularity online are only determined by the amount of backlinks (meaning sites writing about your blog) as well as the quality of the links that are sent your way. We have been blessed with having many readers who not only love what we do but who also have enjoyed sharing our story with their friends and followers. That is a successful project and blog in my eyes, when the many hours you spend working online is compensated by generous quality backlinks. The more links you got from sites with a high pagerank, the higher page rank/authority will you eventually get for your own site. Click here to check your page rank.
Your page rank is pegged on a scale 0-10 and the higher your site ranks on that scale, the more valuable it is in Google's eyes. Our blog has page rank #5, which is very high being an independent blog without support from a large newspaper platform or such. Every website or blog whose aim is to make money on their site wants to have as high pagerank as possible so you can dominate search engine rankings and to be interesting in the eyes of advertisers.
When compared with other sailing/cruising/sport/travel blogs or any other blog for that matter, our rank as 5 is regarded to be very good. Most of the independent blogs out there has somewhere between 0-3, some has 4 whereas 5-7 is considered to be very high. To give you a comparison, Facebook and Google has rank #10 obviously, Amazon has #9, Greenpeace #8, New York post has #7, Garance Doré and West Marine has rank #6 and Laser Performance got #4.
Websites which are in the same "league" as us with pagerank #5 are Conde Nast, Blondinbella (one of Sweden's largest blogs written by an inspiring young business woman/blog personality), American Apparel, Not without salt (one of the most popular food and cooking blogs on the Internet) and Style by Kling (one of the world most famous fashion bloggers).
When compared with other sailing/cruising/sport/travel blogs or any other blog for that matter, our rank as 5 is regarded to be very good. Most of the independent blogs out there has somewhere between 0-3, some has 4 whereas 5-7 is considered to be very high. To give you a comparison, Facebook and Google has rank #10 obviously, Amazon has #9, Greenpeace #8, New York post has #7, Garance Doré and West Marine has rank #6 and Laser Performance got #4.
Websites which are in the same "league" as us with pagerank #5 are Conde Nast, Blondinbella (one of Sweden's largest blogs written by an inspiring young business woman/blog personality), American Apparel, Not without salt (one of the most popular food and cooking blogs on the Internet) and Style by Kling (one of the world most famous fashion bloggers).
To check what page rank you got, just type in your own website here and if you'd like, compare your rank with your favorite sites. We are today offered a good amount for ads and partnerships with our blog and considering the amount of inquiries we've received since we've started, a blog like ours is apparently a perfect place to be seen.
If you'd like a tips regarding how to make your blog successful, I can tell you the only good way that I know, which is to be interesting, unique and genuine in your production. You should be faithful to your niche as well as to your readers and instead of constantly chasing new followers, focus on making a damn good blog and to build an intimate relationship with the readers you got and the rest will follow. You will need to spend lots of time and energy on your project and daily updates are crucial when looking for to create and develop a highly ranked blog. There are today over 156 million blogs in existence so you better be unique, dedicated and hard working in order to stand out among the rest. It's all about building a true and strong foundation, just like with any other business.
