So Karl had a post yesterday about what he called Alpha Bloggers.  Now this is a term I’ve heard a few times when it came to bloggers, but apparently it has a more humane definition.  See, I always thought that the Alpha Bloggers were those cut throat bloggers, similar to what Dave talked about in his post last week… and that the A-List Bloggers were the “popular” bloggers.  I’m not going to spend a whole post going over what equates to semantics, but I think you get the point.

One of the things I found very interesting was who Karl listed as the bloggers he viewed as Alpha/A-List.  Out of the four he mentioned, I have only one in my feedreader.  Yet, the only reason I read Seth Godin is because I find him incredibly irreverent to society at large… not because I think he’s a talented writer.  I can relate to what he writes.  That is the thing which I think gets hugely overshadowed in blogging by these so called Alpha/A-List Bloggers.  Being able for your readers to relate to you is what makes you successful whether you have a million readers… or just one.

Blog statistics and analytics packages are usually what a blogger uses to measure “success”, since that seems to be what the ad companies and other web entities use for their measurements.  Very early on, I did the same thing using Google Analytics.  Then I learned the truth about statistics… if you learn how to read them they show you exactly how unsuccessful you are.  Allow me to explain a bit further:

I’m using May as my example month because of the even number days (30) and the fact that I think this is most representative of a normal traffic month.  I’m not posting these statistics to try and brag or anything, and if you read through, you will see that there really isn’t much to brag about:

April 2008 Statistics for APODB:

Total Visits (Uniques): 5,632
Total Pageviews: 8,034
Average Visits Per Day: 187.7
Average Pageviews Per Day: 267.8
Average Time Spent on Site: 0:57 (seconds)

Seems like alot right?  Well here’s a quick glance as to where that traffic came from.  I had 208 Referrers that month and here is how it broke down with my Top 5 Referrers:

Total Referred Traffic: 4,527
Google: 836 Avg Time: 0:41
Google Images: 1,936 Avg Time: 0:18
(Average Visits Per Day from just Google: 92.4)
Bloglines: 231 Avg Time: 1:35
Poppycede: 204 Avg Time: 1:20
MyBlogLog: 125 Avg Time: 5:01
Top 5 Total: 3,332
Rest of the Blogosphere: 1,195

So what does this tell me?

This tells me that 50% of my traffic can’t relate to me.  My site pops up in a Google search for something, the Google reader scans, and the Google reader leaves.  Then there is 21% of my traffic that comes from the Rest of the Blogosphere… which basically equates to people jumping around blogrolls or clicking through to my URL from a site where I left a comment.  In fact, sites 6-11 are blogs that did not link to me once during the month of May… yet I commented on their blogs relatively frequently which eventually added to my own traffic from them.  There was 3% of my traffic from my girlfriend who links to me constantly (not that I don’t love it!) and therefore drove some readers my way.  Finally, by visiting other blogs with the MyBlogLog widget I was able to get visitors that amounted to 2% of my traffic.

This tells me that 4% of my traffic can relate to me.  There are 8 people a day who relate with my message enough for them to click through Bloglines.  Only about 3 Google Reader users a day click through in comparison, so its a total of 11 bringing it to 6% of my traffic.  I was only able to relate to 6% of the people who visit my blog. In all honesty… that number would be lower because I haven’t figured feed readers into all of this, and I really did not go counting comments… but that number sounds like a good average for a month per post for me.

But how many people here caught the important statistic?  Do you know which one it is?  Yeah… it’s Average Time On Site.  In case you haven’t noticed… I’m pretty longwinded.  So unless everyone out there has taken a speed reading class I’m not aware of… yeah… alot of the visits haven’t read the content in a place where content is supposed to be king.  That my friends is how unsuccessful I am.

As I said in Karl‘s post, a very wise blogger once told me:

It doesn’t matter what your traffic stats are, how many comments you get, how many RSS readers you have, or how much your ads make.  What matters is how you have been able to affect someone’s life when they walk away from the computer.

Hence why I consider myself to be an Omega Blogger.  I am an Omega Blogger because I don’t count comments, links, or use statistics as proof of popularity… I use it as proof of failure.  What I do value has nothing to do with being able to affect someone online… it has everything to do with being able to have had an affect on them when they aren’t.  I am an Omega Blogger because unlike the Alpha Bloggers and the A-List Bloggers who have turned themselves into brands, I’m doing it for the same reason blogging started in the first place… for the love of having the opportunity to change the world.

One blog post at a time.