We look at a popular competitive analysis tool.
As part of Day 4 of the 31 days to a better blog challenge we were all asked to analyze a successful blog in our our respective niches. There are quite a few online tools available for in depth competitive analysis. We thought we would go over some of these tools as part of the challenge. For excitebylife we chose zenhabits.net as the premium blog in our niche to analyze. It the a top 100 blog as ranked by Technorati.
ZenHabits.net has some impressive statistics. Voted number 9 of the top 25 blogs of 2009 by Time magazine. The site has 100,000+ RSS subscribers and gets a staggering 1.5 million page views a month.
The site design and content seems to be the main attraction however we found that despite the popularity and being voted the 9th best blog in the world monetization may be an issue for the owners due to the visitor demographics and topic.
Quick Overview Of ZenHabits
For a good quick overview of the popularity of any website you can use Domain Tools. Here are the results returned for zenhabits.net extracted from http://whois.domaintools.com/zenhabits.net
Alexa Trend/Rank: #27,928: Down 10,558 ranks over the last three months.
Compete Rank: #7,427 with 254,993 U.S. visitors per month
Quantcast Rank: #6,189
Related Sites:
lifehack.org, (0.74 non commercial intent)
lifedev.net (0.73 non commercial intent)
Content
2-6 posts a day are posted consistently. It seems invited celebrity bloggers post their related articles for the back link juice benefit they get to their websites and their twitter profiles. They are very high quality articles and as a result always attract at least 70 comments.
Topics driving the most traffic according to compete.com and alexa.com are frugal living, de-cluttering, eating healthily and saving money.
The post format is mainly of the list format along with the “7 ways ..” type of post titles.
There are lots of links within each post to previous posts on the blog.
Reader Engagement
Productivity, organization and goals type topics get the most posts in the forum specifically those dealing with avoiding distractions, procrastination, help with memory, biggest time wasters, and new years resolutions.
Most of the comments are from people identifying with one or more of each author’s point topics. We did not see any complaints about any of the topics in the comments.
Heavy use of track backs is made and this adds to the content on each posting in addition to the numerous comments.
Design
Our first impression of the blog is that it is very minimalist. The fonts are also large and easy to read. A large graphic of a person or people doing something related to the post topic is always included in each post. The graphics are very large, 400 x 300 pixels to 400 x 600 pixels typically.
There is a large RSS subscribe button in the page header as well as a social proof statistic listing to the right listing 105,600+ people subscribed.
Monetization
Most advertisers are related to frugal living and saving money niche. We don’t think this is a very lucrative niche to be blogging about as the audience are more interested saving money not in spending it. Leo at the time of writing this blog post had a donation button on his about page which further confirmed this at the time.
Leo does have his own hard cover amazon book in addition to some of his own ebooks sold directly from the site. So, there is probably a lot of income derived from the sale of books.
Adwords is used very sparingly but tastefully between each blog post. With the amount of traffic, this would be a major source of revenue. The adwords advertisements look obvious and could be blended in a bit more with the content text.
None of the related blogs have high commercial intent except for livingonadime.com (commercial intent 0.63). livingonadime.com is in the lucrative debt niche.
We also used KeywordSpy.com to look at zenhabits.net main PPC competitors. They were mindapp.com and bankyourtime.com
Based on keywordspy.com the best ROI keywords (based on advertiser Cost Per Click and traffic volume) in order are
| PPC Competitor | Keywords |
| mindapp.com |
|
| bankyourtime.com |
|
Traffic
Non-Commercial Intention: 0.93
http://adlab.msn.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/Default.aspx
This tool detects customer intent to acquire information or to purchase products based on their search queries or recently visited URLs as recorded on the MSN network.
So most visitors are probably not buyers as there is a very high non-commercial intention.
Top Keywords Driving Traffic:
- zen habits
- frugal living
- zenhabits
- how to save money
- healthy breakfast
Search Terms Driving Traffic
http://alexa.com/siteinfo/zenhabits.net
Top keywords driving traffic to zenhabits.net from search engines over the past month.
- healthy breakfast
- debt elimination
- meditation for beginners
- declutter
- frugal living
Demographics Prediction (MSN)
http://adlab.msn.com/Demographics-Prediction/DPUI.aspx
Female oriented 18-24
Demographics Prediction (Quantcast)
http://www.quantcast.com/zenhabits.net
The people who visit zenhabits.net are also likely to visit
- unclutterer.com (non commercial 0.71)
- organizedhome.com (non commercial 0.74)
- flylady.net (non commercial 0.95)
- livingonadime.com (commercial 0.63)
- thesimpledollar.com (non commercial 0.55)
Mainly Female 35 year old college educated Caucasians with no children and 30-60k disposable income. The traffic is mainly passers-by and not regular according to quantcast. Maybe a course on Zen habits or “a challenge series” would make the traffic stick more.
SEO
Who is linking to this blog ?
I prefer to use the yahoo site explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com_ over google because site explorer gives more accurate results and has better features for this exercise. When using site explorer use the option “show inlinks: except from this domain to: entire site”.
Using this method there were over 48,614 external in links mainly from other blogs, which is astounding.
Conclusion
For our particular niche, it will be difficult to monetize if we post similar topics to what zenhabits does, even in the unlikely event we achieved the amount of traffic received by zenhabits.net. Topics on solving peoples problems such as improving memory, mind mapping, brain storming, debt consolidation and time management tool reviews would achieve a higher ROI.
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About Danny Sheehan
Danny lives in Hong Kong but is originally from Australia. He is Married to Maggie and together they have two children with whom they enjoy sharing and enjoying an exciting life with daily. Danny's passions are freedom, adventure and discovery, mainly in nature and science but also spiritually. He is a great believer in living in the NOW.
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