*Author’s update:  the Compete.com data should be dismissed.  Darren Rowse of Problogger states that his site receives upwards of 500,000 uniques, not the 28,000 uniques as reported by Compete.com.  Shame on me for trusting Compete.com.  Anyone have a (much) better public web traffic tool?

There are many, many sites that produce helpful content for bloggers.  How does a blogger determine which blog is right for them?  To help out our readers who blog themselves, I figured I’d dive deep into two blogs that have been indexed by Pinyadda for over 6 months: ProBlogger.net (PB) and Copyblogger.com (CB).

Since June 1st, here is some data for both PB and CB:

Chart 1: A comparison of PB and CB by the number of items indexed by Pinyadda since June 1st and each site’s Unique Users value for the month of June, 2010 as reported by Compete.com

As shown, PB has published more items since 6/1/2010 but received significantly less traffic than CB in June.   These numbers are helpful, but continue reading for more information about each site.

About

CB was founded in 2006 by Brian Clark.  By scanning the author names of roughly 25 posts, it appears there are 8-10 writers contributing to CB.  PB was started in September of 2004 by Darren Rowse.  With the exception of a handful of guest posts, it appears most of the content is created by Rowse himself.

Both CB and PB maintain Twitter handles.  Interestingly, CB’s significant lead in site traffic is reversed if you look at their Twitter communities, where  Darren Rowse (@problogger) has twice as many followers as Brian Clark (@copyblogger): 101,647 followers vs. 55,874 followers.

Site Layout

Below is a comparison of CB’s and PB’s homepages.  Recent CB articles are in the tradition center column while PB’s recent articles are aligned left.  I find CB’s interface more accessible upfront, but I found myself spending more time  on PB because of the sheer amount of information on the page.

Content

CB’s content heavily relies on list posts (like Make Your Readers Love You:  5 Lessons from Pixar and The 7 Secrets of Running a  Wildly Popular Blog), which from experience do very well with regards to traffic.  These types of posts, however, generally have a high bounce rate and do not convert article-viewers into consistent blog readers.

PB’s content has some list-type posts (like 10 Common Spelling Mistakes That Haunts Bloggers) but there is a greater variety of stuff on PB compared to CB.  Not only does PB seem less reliant on list posts for blog content, but PB has additional resources for bloggers like a paid forum and a job board.  The community at PB would have to be extremely strong and knowledgeable to justify paying for a community forum, but a job board is definitely a nice touch.

In conclusion, I hope you see the inherent value of both of these blogs as I now do.  Ultimately, you’ll probably read CB for one thing and PB for another.

Here are some more sites about blogging that Pinyadda has been indexing for less than 6 months (thus, not completely accurate data).  I will follow up with these sites on their 6-month Pinyadda anniversary.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 27th, 2010 at 10:35 am and is filed under Publishers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.