Blue MauMau Traffic Rising

Blue MauMau Traffic Grows to Level of IFA Franchiser Community

SALT LAKE CITY, UT - According to Alexa.com, Blue MauMau readers read more pages than any other major franchise site. Its traffic rank has passed the International Franchise Association's site franchise.org, and its "reach" (something akin to unique visitors) is beginning to pass the IFA's. This is all organic growth. Blue MauMau has not spent a dime in search engine marketing to grab Net traffic. So clearly something good is happening here because of the efforts of our community. Just look at the charts...

Although far from perfect, Alexa is an index that gives a rough idea of how a site does compared to others.

Blue MauMau readers spend a lot more time on our site reading (see chart above of our site in blue compared to the IFA site in red.)  compared to other major franchise site rankings. Page views per user for a 3 month average is 20 pages, which is the highest of any major franchise website that we've seen. (These charts consist of dynamic data. The figures are a moving target, drifting up and down sometimes hourly, and have probably moved away from the numbers cited. So, I may have egg on my face.) However, most likely those high numbers will drift down as general Net surfer traffic builds. Surfers tend to want to find information fast and then leave. (And Yes. We've noticed that Alexa needs to recalibrate its chart so that Y-Axis numbers match its printed numbers.)

Traffic ranking of all web sites on Alexa is ranked with Yahoo as the #1 most visited site and MSN with a 2 traffic rank. Once again, the IFA's 3 month average is 53,722 and for Blue MauMau is 54,982. For a general gauge like Alexa, this is too close to call. What it can tell geeks and marketers like me is that both sites are in the same ballpark in traffic hits or people clicking to the site for the last 3 months. Blue MauMau started the 3 month period with considerably less traffic and built to having more in September.

What one looks for with the index is a clear seperation of scale and line trends, like the clear seperation by Blue MauMau from the red line of franchise.org (the IFA's site) in September that the chart above shows.

"Reach" seems to indicate unique visitors. Alexa ranks this as daily number of readers per million web surfers. As can be seen, our community members keep coming and reading lots of pages. However, we've trailed the IFA in unique visitors or what is called reach per million Net users until just recently. At the end of September, we are running neck and neck with the IFA. The good news is that Monday, Sep 24 we are at 15 readers per million Internet users and the IFA is at 10. (Again, that really just shows that we are both in the same ballpark.)

Alexa has biases. For example, it watches users who have the Alexa toolbar installed. But it seems to do its job as an independent gauge well enough. The next alternative would be to trust that site administrators are giving correct figures from their own site to their customers. However, when ad dollars are at stake, the temptation to bend the numbers generated by their own server log is high. After all, who else is going to be able to look at the server log numbers? Hence, the need for an independent gauge like Alexa.com.

The gist of all of this data is that one can see that our site is organically growing through word of mouth to be a major force in the online franchise world.

We are on the right path to getting a lot of people involved in franchising, but your help is greatly needed in getting the word out about the quality of franchise information and community experience here. Tell your friends. One easy way to do this is to email articles you read here that you think will interest colleagues and franchise friends. Just click the email button on the bottom of each story or blog. If you like it here, tell someone about it.

The more in our community, the merrier. Oh, and the more information is made available.

For all the visitors and registered users lurking in the shadows, please do not be shy in contributing. Part of the fun of this place is to share weblinks, blogs, forum posts, book reviews, franchipedia articles, audio podcasts, photos, jokes or documents. And like information on the Internet should be, it's all free! We understand that you may need time to warm up to the idea of publishing, but don't be shy. We'd love to hear your questions or your experiences with franchising.