Where can I get my $3,387.24?

I was doing a little research on linkbaiting thanks to a comment made by Mark Patsy on the Power to the Pod People post. I found Dane Carlson's Business Opportunities blog that had a cool entry which actually puts a dollar value on your blog. Dane bases his valuation formula on the link valuation research of Tristan Louis after AOL bought blog network Weblogs Inc. In short, each link to your blog is valued somewhere between $500 and $1000.

So according to Dane's valuation tool which uses the Technorati API, my blog is valued at $3,387.24. Now I was actually thinking more like $1.95 because I really haven't been linked to much at all as of yet, so I was pleasantly surprised. But take a look at the valuations of some of the most popular sites that I like:

• Engadget - $14,498,516.28
• Postsecret - $6,845,612.04
• ZD Net - $5,228,204.94

Now these are extremely popular sites, but take a look at a few other blogs I check out frequently that are not quite as well known but have loyal followings:

• Anil Dash's blog - $519,376.80
• Mashable - $464,051.88
• Forrester analyst Charlene Li's blog - $134,925.06

So after seeing these numbers I figured the CRM vendor blogs (those that actually have them) would have decent values associated to them. Here's what I found:

• Salesforce.com's CRM Success blog - $3,387.24
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Team blog - $10,726.26
• Oracle Blogs - $0.00
• Entellium CEO Paul Johnston's blog - $0.00
• SAP Executive Blogs - $0.00

Yup...pretty surprising isn't it? My first thought was that my blog was as valuable as Salesforce.com's....cool for me, but not for SFDC. Now I didn't spend a whole lot of time looking for vendor blogs so this is probably not an exhaustive list for sure, but it shouldn't be that hard to find blogs for the biggest players in the space. Since linking is the main basis for the blog valuation tool, it goes without saying that the vendor blogs aren't getting much love so to speak. I guess some people might feel that corporate blogs may be more sales than information driven. To be sure you will see a lot of sales-like stuff there. But the Salesforce and Microsoft blogs do have good solid information about best practice for using their applications. But in general these blogs are just too hard to find. And the SAP executive blogs actually ask you to register before you can view them. When's the last time you had to register to view a blog?

It's time for CRM vendors to create more perceived value with their blogs, and for most of them to actually create blogs in the first place. It's pretty obvious that blogging is here to stay.