How I became #1 Parent Blogger

Giving Birth

Two and a half years ago, I hadn't set out to become the top parent blogger in the World. When I was delivering Deor on our bathroom floor (yep not intentional location of birth) covered in blood, naturally my instincts were set to protect my wife and newborn son. 

Don't Make YouTube Videos About Everything

I made a pretty poor choice to make a YouTube video to document the whole situation later that day having been deprived of sleep for a couple of days (bar an hour long nap) which I took down soon after a few comments from friends and family about the graphic level of detail in my video recall of what happened! 

The Joys of Parenting

One thing was for sure though, there was a lot of information to share and a lot of joy and trouble ahead in the journey of parenting. YouTube, Vine, Twitter and my website blog were great outlets to share a lot of those moments. I was motivated to lose a lot of weight in the final months before Deor was born which I also documented in my blog (which I have managed to keep up to this day and continue to blog about).

Tots 100

After reviewing several baby products on YouTube, I joined the blog list on Tots 100, the UK's biggest blog network. Annoyingly, only traffic for the traditional blog is accounted for which is not really where most traffic and news is shared online these days. My social following outside of YouTube was growing rapidly online but none of this was translated into any kind on Tots 100. I have the unique perspective of working both sides of the coin as both the online influencer and the brand marketer and it has always interested me how best to measure and quantify influence.

Rise Blogger Parent Club

Rise (previously known as Leaderboarded) started a ranking list of parent blogs in 2014 known as the Blogger Parent Club. To keep things simple and up to date, they used Klout scores to rank users. As a YouTuber, I've always found Klout scoring to be inaccurate and overly skewed towards those who have huge Twitter followings. Although users can connect their accounts, YouTube has never been part of the scoring system which I always felt was fundamentally wrong. How could someone with millions of views on YouTube not be counted as influential just because they did not use Twitter or Facebook? It seemed bonkers to me. However, I still felt that this scoring mechanism of influence was fairer than a web traffic ranking system to a website based blog.

Gaining Klout Score

I joined the Rise Blogger Parent Club board in August 2014 at rank #31 and (oddly enough) rose up the board mainly because of changes to Klout and their scoring accuracy rather than any increase in activity by me. First of all, they added Instagram as part of their scoring which I was just starting to use properly. Klout then continued to refine their scoring for Twitter and I marginally increased my usage of Facebook. I was consistently in the top 5 from October 2014 to September 2015 but never hit the top spot. The board's scoring is relative to other users so even when my score increased or decreased greatly from one week to another, many others were affected in the same way too.

My score dipped when my Instagram account was disconnected from Klout for a couple of days before I reauthorised it in September. The score slowly declined until a large spike appeared over the past weekend.

Klout Score Declined with Inactivity

Over the last 3 months, my Klout score started to decline due to lower post frequency on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. I also pretty much stopped using Google+. My rank last week on the Rise Blogger Parent Club was actually 15th, my worst rank in over a year. So how did I magically rise to the top spot? Well it was pretty simple; announced a couple of months ago and finally implemented, Klout added my YouTube data to my Klout score. I literally didn't change any behaviour from last week to this week but the inclusion of my core publishing social platform tipped scoring in my favour.

Klout relevancy

I'm not going to get carried away here. I'm proud to be promoted to the top of the pack, but I didn't have to work for it. The balance of scoring still feels wrong and it is still seriously flawed. In this pie chart, Twitter is still counted as my most influential channel. In my opinion, other metrics like video watch time are far more influential than retweets and replies on Twitter. Video ad spending online appears to support my opinion, yet YouTube accounts for only 21% of my score. 

There are still many other platforms which are unaccounted for like Sina Weibo, Tumblr, Pinterest & Vine. I feel that inclusion of YouTube data is both inaccurate and too late however I am glad that it is finally here. If Klout is to remain relevant and useful as a benchmark, then it has to actually be relevant. For now (this week anyway) I will enjoy being #1!

Comment & Connect

If you have any more tips, tricks, insights or questions, please leave them in the comments below. I will regularly come back to this post to respond to them.

Have you read my blog yet? Connect with me on any of the social networks I use by visiting Kwai Chi on Klout.

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Next read about my Instagram Top 10 Tips or How I became popular on Instagram.

Please note that all commentary are those of Kwai Chi only and do not necessarily reflect the approach from anyone affiliated with Kwai Chi.