Experiment in Improving my Alexa Rank
Published June 4th, 2007 in Blogging.With my recent jump to a Page Rank of 5, I’m beginning to consider options for monetizing this site. Not heavily, but I wouldn’t mind selling a few text link ads. While I’ve used Adsense and Commission Junction on other sites, I have not done much in the way of direct selling of ads and would be interested in any input anyone might have. I don’t even know what the going rate might be for a site with my stats might be. I’ve applied to Text Link Ads, but this blog is new enough, they haven’t been interested so far. As I said, I’m not interested in getting crazy with the ads here. That’s not what this site is about. I’m just looking for a couple of relevant items to put in the sidebar.
I was inspired by David Airey (Graphic Designer in Edinburgh) to try and improve my Alexa ranking, and have been learning about how to do that through his posts and the one at DoshDosh. I’ve installed the Alexa widget, and am starting at 125,976, so we’ll see how it goes from here! Anyone else tried improving their Alexa rank? How did it go?
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17 Responses to “Experiment in Improving my Alexa Rank”
- 1 Pingback on Jul 1st, 2007 at 1:32 pm
I’ll be interested to see how you get on with this, Randa, so keep us informed.
Thanks very much for linking to my recent article, and I’m loving your use of anchor text.
I’ve tried boosting my Alexa ranking in the past. It gets harder to increase as you get it lower. I would just focus on building traffic by whatever means possible and not worry to much about your actual Alexa rank. As traffic increases your Alexa will naturally go down.
Hi Randa,
I was reading a blog post the other day about monetising a blog over at Yaro Starak’s Blog http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/714/my-top-7-blog-monetization-methods/ which may be of interest to you. He also has a video in which he breaks down parts of his blog an how he makes money.
It´ll be interested but i think alexa ranking is not very important.
The easiest way to inflate (implies artificial) Alexa stats is to attract users with the Alexa toolbar installed. Webmasters tend to have it in disproportionate numbers, and your site is likely frequented by that group, so your ranking is likely artificially high to begin with (I would estimate that the typical 100,000ish ranked site in Alexa would receive about 2000 unique visitors / day and thus would suspect that you receive perhaps half that many?)
How to attract users with the toolbar? Release a tool to work with Alexa or write Alexa related content. If you can rank well for “improving my Alexa rank”, you’ll be on your way. Alexa extrapolates from a small sample so they can be manipulated up until the top 100K or so. After that, it gets harder to game. You’ll make that jump easily and with little effort. Moving up from there will likely require more visitors, though as I estimated above, your visitors likely count double due to your niche.
Good luck. Alexa’s pretty easy to manipulate. Good luck with your monitisation attempts. Have you considered places like PayPerPost and Sponsored Reviews?
@Owen - I’ve thought about PPP and probably won’t be doing that here. I would do sponsored reviews because I think it’s relevant to this blog, but so far I haven’t had any to choose from at ReviewMe.
@MedicineMan- thanks for all the good info. I appreciate hearing from people who are more familiar with Alexa than I am.
@Tara - thanks for that link to Y.Starak’s blog - some interesting stuff there, and somehow I hadn’t come across him yet.
I improved the alexa rank of my knitting blog from roughly 500,000 to roughly 178,000 in two months. It’s still dropping. So, I dropped down a factor of 2. The main thing was adding the widget.
Alexa is very, very bad at measuring knitting blog traffic because no one visiting knitting blogs uses the alexa tool bar. So, your results may not be as dramatic as mine!
i don’t like alexa.. and here in brazil nobody have the toolbar.. so the results aren’t good
What is the purpose of improving your Alexa rank? Will it really increase your traffic?
I’m also curious about how much traffic you need for it to be worth it to put ads on the site. Does anyone have any idea?
Alexa rank is just another statistic to report to potential advertisers. The better your rankings in things like Google and Alexa, the more you can hope to earn for ad spots. I really don’t know what kind of rankings bring in what kind of ad prices per month. I’m just preparing for the possibility of selling a couple of spots.
It’s quite funny but my auto blog which has a Alexa ranking of 598,753 and has PR 3, gets the maximum attention from advertisers and sponsors as compared to my other blogs which have better Alexa and page rankings.
Some of the ReviewMe and PPP type sites use a variety of ways to judge what a post or link from your site is worth. Some use Technorati rankings, some use a combination of Technorati, Alexa and PR rankings to decide how much to pay a site.
If you want them to show you the money, you have to show them popularity and some traffic….or something that looks like traffic.
Don
Something that looks like traffic? What kinds of things can you show them that “look like traffic”? I’m curious…
I got alexa widget and it is weird because it is giving me a rank of 16.