Using the alexa toolbar to improve readership and income

If you’re looking to build a strong readership, gain Page Rank (PR) and monetize your blog, the Alexa tool bar is a solid way to gauge your reach, and can open many windows of opportunity when it comes to getting paid advertising on your site.

If you build your blog with attention to the “powers that be” – e.g. Google PR and Alexa – it is definitely possible to build your blog into a profitable work from home enterprise, or leverage your blog as a source of passive income.

Alexa.com offers a free toolbar, a search engine, and a directory – among other services. Many professional bloggers utilize a resource called Alexa Traffic Rankings which is what they are working to build and improve as far as Alexa Rank.

Very basically, every site Alexa “touches” or is exposed to via it’s toolbar is logged, and a site “rank” is developed as more people visit your blog. Each site has ranking number, the lower the number the better, which is an aggregate of the last three months of traffic data. I urge everyone who follows a blog or two to install the Alexa tool bar.

This may help you to attract paid spots, because the lower your Alexa Rank, the more widely viewed your blog is… and advertisers pay more to place their paid link or spot on blogs that have more readers. That’s why I use the Alexa toolbar 90% of the time, via a Google Chrome add-on to my tool bar. Sometimes hoping for more web traffic isn’t enough – so using all the tools you have in an efficient way can make a huge difference in the way your site performs. There’s also the option of having an Alexa Site Audit done, to see what might be done in order to gain a stronger readership.

However… I’ve (finally stopped stressing about what my Alexa Rank is. Accrding to Source Blogger and Extreme John (two Blog Tips/SEO sites I like to read), WAY too many people place great weight on what their Alexa Rank is. I confess to being one of them! My main blog (and primary income source) Thriftability.com started out at the 1.85 million mark. Keeping in mind, lower numbers on Alexa are better, and most sites start out in the millions.

I learned about Alexa through a network of personal finance bloggers at Yakezie.com. (My personal finance blog, Thriftability, is a Yakezie Challenger.) SourceBlogger has it right… many new bloggers WILL obsess about improving their Alexa Rank – and let me say from experience: it’s a tremendous accomplishment to get your number low… but it cuts like a knife to see those numbers rise.

I used to check my Alexa rank every morning when I sat down to work. Thriftability made it to 212k – and I was elated! This all happened because I was doing a lot of networking, commenting on other (alexa-using) blogs, and writing a lot of 1005 unique content. Then I was forced to cut back work due to a neck injury, and my site suffered. So did my Alexa rank. That site is now making a come-back, showing 312K… so my setback caused a raise by 100,000. Yikes!

This episode forced me to really take a look at what is important in creating a strong showing in the blogosphere. Building a business around blogging takes knowledge ( read, read, read!), dedication (blog every day if you can, every other is acceptable, twice a week is an absolute must!) and determination – as in… grow from your successes and be OK with taking a step back if what you’re doing doesn’t seem to be working.

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