What do you base it on? For months people have been dancing at the tune of the Google PageRank Toolbar and basing their ROI on it, at least partially.
Yesterday's news about many top ranking blogs being demoted was a downer. As I wrote in my FC Expert blog post today, Google's math puzzles customers.
As explained by Google
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages' relative importance.
Google's core business remains the search business so they employ complex automated methods to make human tampering with their search results extremely difficult. What does PageRank mean to you and to the reason why you blog?
There are many lists out these that use Google PageRank as one of the measurements -- AdAge Power150 comes to mind, and so does the M20. Being on one of these lists may be a good thing for your blog to be noticed and read. Yet it may not be the "R" in your ROI. What's the real return you're looking for?
I suspect that CK may say that learning from the community she's helped form around marketing topics of interest is part of her "R". The Diva might add that helping organizations (and people) understand the value and power of building a social media strategy for their business is what matters most.
I really light up when I have deeper conversations with like minded people who may stumble upon one of my posts and decide to stick around and meet the person and vice versa, I love discovering well written and thoughtful resources and getting to know the author(s). Red carpet treatment for people who share ideas in the comments.
We talk about ROI in businesses all the time. When it comes to your personal pursuits, as it might be the case with blogging, what is your return on the time invested? A couple of weeks ago I talked about the "I" of social media being involvement. What's the "R" for you?
[image from Search Engines on Flickr]