So I don’t know Paul Stamatiou. I’ve never met him. I only discovered his Blog yesterday. But he is now on The List.

Why?

For no other reason than his blogging success.
The guy starts out with a half-dead mac-mini one year ago, and starts blogging on Wordpress with a K2 Theme on Technology and other things. One year later after a helluva lot of sweat and tears:

1. Alexa Rank: 24 305
2. Feedburner Subscribers: 2284
3. PageRank: 5

Nice. :)

What’s interesting is that in his one year anniversary post, he makes an interesting comment:

I realize that many of you enjoy reading my content through RSS. That’s good and I wanted to say that I’ll always be providing full, ad-free feeds. However, I encourage you to minimize your RSS aggregator every once in a while and chime in on the conversation, or even start one up. That’s how I know if people are actually listening. Site metrics are one thing; actual, tangible involvement and engagement is another. How will I ever know if I got through to the 3,676 people that stopped by yesterday?

One of my other passing fancies is web metrics. And I think Mr. Stamatiou hit it right on the head with this one. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what your Alexa Rank, the number of posted subscribers, pagerank, or other magical forms of metrics you use.

(Well, perhaps if you try and sell advertising on your website it is — but I digress.)

I think the real measure of a site’s effectiveness is just that – how effective it is in garnering an action … a response.

Although most blogs are not geared towards asking for an action, so you can measure a reaction, I wonder if its something that all blogs should do every once and a while.

Sort of like rotating the wheels.

Because all the traffic in the world means nothing if you they’re not responsive to your own writings, thoughts and words. On e-commerce sites this a more mercenary metric is the conversion rate. At the end of the day, the inbound traffic is an interesting number compared to the percentage who actually DO something.

Do I care if your site gets 100 000 uniques a day if

• after repeated solicitations you get no participation in your comments
• you have no signups
• you have no sales
• you have no click throughs on your ads?

Well, again, if you’re selling “reach”, then perhaps not. But conceptually, a better metric than pageviews or “subscribers” is understanding how response they really are. A blog, retailing site, or what have you can survive on minimal traffic if they’re active enough to support the site.

Yes, of course, the irony is that I’m writing about responsiveness, and you can’t help but notice that … well there aren’t too many active conversations on this site.

But then again, I’ve just celebrated my one month anniversary. ;)

But back to Mr. Stamatiou – Congratulations on your efforts. More important than your traffic stats, you clearly have an active and engaged following of fans.

Well done.