Waggener Edstrom and the Blog Business Summit: Comparing Site Stats

As many of us already know, it can be difficult at times to express the “blog advantage” to the uninitiated. Lately I have been leveraging a demo that where I compare my site (which is a series of blogs) visibility to other traditional sites (usually a site that the person getting the demo has been involved with). The result is usually a “light bulb” moment, and they get quite excited. Today I showed my demo to a local PR professional (we are getting quite a few PR people signing up) and had to pass on the results to our readers.

I asked my friend “what is the largest PR firm in Seattle?” She said “Waggener Edstrom is the biggest one in the Northwest, and one of the biggest in the U.S.”. So, I did some comparing of our two sites:

Google searches and resulting pages finding mentions of:
“Blog Business Summit”: 27,800
“Waggener Edstrom”: 21,600

Alexa traffic ranking (a lower number is better):
www.blogbusinesssummit.com: 365,568
www.wagged.com: 620,895

Google Pagerank (a higher number is better):
www.blogbusinesssummit.com: 7
www.wagged.com: 5

Keep in mind the following:

• Waggener Edstrom has had a Web site for probably ten years and has issued thousands of press releases. The Blog Business Site has been up since late October and has issued no press releases.

• Waggener Edstrom has full-time gurus who totally grok search engine optimization. We have a full-time wheaten terrier, and have done little to no SEO.

• Waggener Edstrom has offices in Oregon, Texas, and Washington, as well as Germany and the UK. The Blog Business summit has a single office in Kirkland WA, and a storage unit in Redmond.

• Waggener Edstrom has sales of around $70 million, comparatively BBS doesn’t even have enough revenue to count as a rounding error.

• Waggener Edstrom wins awards constantly for being a great place to work and for their innovative and successful campaigns. I personally received the “inspirational swimmer” award my senior year of high school.

Most Importantly:

• We have specifically pursued bloggers as marketing partners. I am not aware of any blogger outreach for Waggener Edstrom

• The Blog Business Summit site issues RSS feeds. The Waggener Edstrom site does not.

• The Blog Business Summit site communicates in a conversational, informal tone. The Waggener Edstrom has a professional, polished tone.

• According to Google, the BBS site mentions the word “blog” 104 times. Waggener Edstrom site, zero times.

• In the past 12 hours, the summit has been mentioned in 4 blogs (according to technorati). Waggener Edstrom in zero blogs.

Now don’t get me wrong. Waggener Edstrom is a terrfic company, and could crush us like a bug as far as any serious media competition goes. Everyone knows they are one of the most successful ventures in the world. No doubt they will continue undaunted long after the BBS (and I) have been put out to pasture. My point is that there is amazing leverage in 1) using a blog platform to host your site, and 2) working closely with bloggers. These guys have a great Web presence, I am only saying it would be better with some blog-enabled assistance.

BTW, If anyone from WE wants to come to the summit and learn more about blogging and bloggers, we’d love to see them there.