You may be aware that the full results of the Top vBlog 2015 voting by Eric Siebert at vSphere-land.com are out (sponsored by Infinio). Part 1 is an analysis of my blog performance from a statistics perspective, since I have access to all of my blog data. Part 2 is based upon the Top 25 vBlogs.
How did I go?
After blogging for one year, I ranked number 37 on the list as a newbie:
I also placed number 2 for Favourite New Blog:
And number 6 for Favourite Independent Blog:
My Blog Traffic
So I compared this to my blog traffic over the past year. For the month of March I had 32K views and 11K unique visitors. From the Top vBlog results I can see that 96 people voted VCDX133.COM for a total of 657 points.
Which means that 0.8% of my visitors for March 2015 actually voted for me. I suspect that for all vBloggers, our readership consumes our content to get things done and rarely participates in the Top vBlog voting. This makes sense, since only 2,200 people voted for Top vBlog 2015.
The conundrum to ponder: “How do I get my visitors to vote for me during the Top vBlog competition?” Something more than blogging and tweeting, “Please, please vote for me!”
My “Marketing” Strategy for 2015
I took some of the earnings from my site and invested it in advertising VCDX133.COM. I had not seen that done before and wanted to see what would happen.
So I advertised with FrankDenneman.nl, Yellow-Bricks.com and vSphere-land.com during the Top vBlog campaign. You may have seen my slightly annoying, branded GIF during that time. 
It was originally a JPEG, but I wanted something that drew the eye of the reader.
From the Campaign report below, my ad was displayed 194K times over the 30 day period with 107 clicks. Aside from novelty and amusement, I have no idea if it added any value. It is interesting to note that the number of ad clicks is close to the number of votes I received.
Summary
This year more than 2,200 people voted for the top vBlogs from a pool of 411 registered entrants, who all generate great content. There will definitely be new, additional blogs for next year’s competition, which will make the Top 10/25/50 even harder to achieve.
Consider the dedication and effort it takes to maintain a blog and ask yourself, “How will I differentiate myself from the competition?” I have some new ideas that I will try for 2016.
vcdx133.com 