LinkMoney.org

Archive for October, 2009

Alexa is owned by Amazon and they use a rating system that estimates all website traffic.  When a site is brand spanking new it starts out with an Alexa rank of several million.  In this ranking system the smaller the number that your website receives is better.

Your site will not start to show up in the Alexa charts until your site is in the top 100,000.  To tell the truth I never worried much about it and I never have worried much about the Google Page Rank score either.  In GPR your site is rated as a number from 0 to 9, or possibly 10 not sure about that.

Now lately I have had two different companies contact me out of the blue to ask for my advertising rate for inclusion of either banner ads or a simple anchor text ad.  This is about the only time that the Alexa score really counts because advertisers that are in the know do look at the Alexa number to decide whether or not to spend part of their marketing budget with you or say John Chow.  I do have a feeling that my ad rate is slightly below John Chow’s but I want to change that.

So here’s the deal.  On the next post after this one I am going to start a contest that will run until the end of the year.  My goal is to see my Alexa ranking drop to below 100,000 and so I not only will have bragging rights but that my daily chart will look real cool in the sidebar, and hopefully the advertisers will be enticed to spend a buck or two with me.

Here is where you readers come in.  I will have multiple ways that you can enter the contest.  There will be three good prizes.  “Good Prizes!” All entrants will have an equal chance in the final drawing and you will be able to increase your chances through performing multiple tasks to help this site get some recognition.  More about all of this and I will have full details in the next post.

The following are some things that I have been doing on my own to help this site and you will no doubt want to do some of these for your own site, and I encourage it.  Some of these things will be used as entrant’s requirements to enter the forthcoming contest here on Linkmoney.org.

Here is what I have been doing lately in the case of trying to improve Alexa score.
First of all it is not an exact science but if you ever intend to sell paid advertisements it is reported that advertisers look at this score as part of their evaluation of your website. Needles to say a lower Alexa score is better.

Alexa tells us that the score is developed from an average of your past three month’s traffic stream. However what some people do not realize is that it is not a fair and accurate measurement because the only traffic that counts in Alexa’s eyes is from browsers that have the Alexa toolbar installed on them.

So a deep meaning website that might be chock full of good socially beneficial content, but might be more apt to be visited by readers that do not have the toolbar installed, do not get the votes. Primarily the sites that gain the most benefit from this system would be the make money online, or Blogs about blogging, domaining, coding, and so on. In other words the majority of visitors would be propeller heads and might more likely be apt to have the Alexa toolbar installed.

So what I recommend is that everyone go to Alexa right now and install the toolbar in your browser, and then for what it is worth and I do believe it counts, set your own website up to be your computer start up homepage. That way every time you turn your computer on or page out and revisit your own site is a vote.   (In the past two days I have seen my own score drop 6,000 points and I believe it is only from performing this feature.)

Another thing I do is to grab the Alexa sidebar widget that shows your Alexa score and the number of back links that Alexa has discovered for your site. (See mine down at the lower right hand side.)  So, just slide a text box widget over to your sidebar, and insert the code and you are good to go. I also add a text title that tells the reader to “Click for Alexa Vote” (or something like it.) That way even if a reader does not have the Alexa toolbar, and they click on the widget banner, then that is a vote for your site also.

One other thing that I have just started to do is to use the Alexa site voting feature, and I give an Alexa five star rating to friends and they return the favor. So anyone that will go to Alexa and give this site a five star rating will be immediately entered into the forthcoming contest, “and” I also will return the favor, just let me know when you have posted the five star rating for Linkmoney.org.

I have not found anyone that is willing to say for sure that it helps in the overall Alexa scoring, but the way I look at it is that I suspect it does, and if not it can’t hurt anything. So it is election season, let’s all vote each other a nice easy government job. LOL

Cheers.
Rich Hill

Ps: This site uses the CommentLUV widget and also the Top Commentator widget.  So the top commentators will receive a do follow backlink.  Do not spam it or you will be deleted obliterated, and an Exocet missile will home in on your signal generating device.  Please leave as many nice comments as you want at any time, not just for a contest event.

Happy Halloween.

Update on value of increasing Alexa ranking. If you are in to List Building you will want to check out Jack Humphreys instructions on how to get more subscribers to your list.

I asked myself the obvious, “Is Google Sniper the real deal”?  If you are in the Internet Marketing business and trying to find the best ways to make some money online then you have no doubt tried many different systems.  Some work really well, some are just plain old duds.

So with full disclosure: There are affiliate advertisements for this product on this website. But in this case I am going to give you my own impressions and opinion of this product, Google Sniper.  I am not being paid by George Brown or any other person or company to tell you this.  I will however earn a commission if you do decide to try it yourself.

Chances are you heard some of the build up to the forthcoming release of Google Sniper the buzz was everywhere.  “18 year old former furniture mover earns $15,000 per month…” I usually avoid these things like a plague, but for some reason this one had a little different twist and I wanted to know more.

Jack Humphrey of Friday Traffic Report and BlogSuccess fame is the one who first made me aware of Google Sniper and I trust Jack. I am a member of BlogSuccess, and decided to go a little deeper.

The first thing that made me almost back off entirely was that George was only 18 years old when he reportedly hit the big time and developed Google Sniper.  Well at the ripe old age of 19 now he is sending messages to his minions from Thailand and other exotic places as he is taking a leisurely trip around the world.  You see George “has people” now.  He can come and go as he damn well pleases.

I remember last year one time I was on one of the mmo forums and some pimple faced geek claimed he was making $10K a week using Adwords and selling some shitty Acai Berry weight loss product.  I called that dude out and said if that was true he would be on Oprah and man was I surprised!  That kid had followers that booed me right off the podium.  Turns out he “was” making that kind of money as a young teen-ager.  Friggin incredible!

I have been trying dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of things in the last three years to try to make some serious cash with Adsense and affiliate marketing.  Some have been OK, many were flops, but what the hey?  So I joined the program.  It was less than a hundred bucks and I have wasted more than that thousands of times.  “Hey it’s about my time”!

So if you are in that same position you will do well to download your copy of the Google Sniper training program and videos, and make sure you follow the steps.  Here is why I say that.  George takes the approach that you are a first time IM wannabe, and he starts out with just how to get set up with WordPress and what plugins to install, etc.  “Come on George I know all that crap, give me the tricky stuff”, I’m thinking’.

Turns out, there is no “tricky stuff”.    I was expecting to hear the voice of a Crazy Eddie or the Sham wow guy, but not at all.  George does not sound like a kid at all and you can tell immediately that he has two things going for him.  The first is that he has some very powerful grey matter between his ears, and the next, though I have no proof, I’ll bet he had a wonderful set of parents teaching him manners and right from wrong in his growth years.

If you follow his plan and select the perfect niches, and he tells you how to find them, and more importantly how to select the “right” one, then you will make money.  Let’s put it this way.  I have found a niche to start a fresh brand new Google Sniper program with and will have it up and running in a week or so.  Got to clear my plate of many other projects with loose ends first.

So what I did two days ago was to take some of the key points of his marketing plan and instituted them on one of my better niche sites.  This site has become an authority site in the “Green” category.  It is a GPR3, Alexa about 300K and has regular readers plus about 200 to 300 per day that find it in search.  It ranks top 10 for about a dozen good keywords in green.

That site regularly kicks off five ten bucks a day in PPC and about the same in affiliate products.  I put some ClickBank products on it a few months ago and it usually has a half-dozen or so hops per week and once in a while a reader makes an investment in some item that catches their fancy.

That was two days ago that I used just one tiny part of the Google Sniper training program on.  Yesterday from 300 viewers I had 95 CB hops to an alternate energy product.  There was no trickery, no sleight-of-hand.  Everything that I presented about the product was in full disclosure that it was an advertisement and all I did was use George’s easy method.

Why did it work?  Will it hold up?  Was it a flash in the pan?  Those are obvious questions and there is no immediate answer, however, I know deep down inside that this is good stuff.  These are common sense approaches that anyone can do by working the plan.

All I can tell you further is that it is working for me and I am positive that it will work for you if you can follow “very” simple instructions and forget your previous methods.

You can click this link: Is Google Sniper the real deal, or any of the affiliate banners that are on this site to check it out for yourself.

Here’s the way I see it. We all Blog, right? Well do you Flog for links?

You’ve heard it all before, write good content and other authority sites will link to you. Bull shit! In your dreams they will. The following procedures are of course nothing that I would do but you might like to know about the possibility of Flogging.

Some Bloggers set up multiple Blogs in every niche market that they intend to Blog in. Then after you have written several good posts on your primary niche marketing Blog, you can then start posting articles in the secondary Blogs, or as I like to call them Flogs, and include some nice anchor text keyword hyperlinks to your primary site. Simple right?

Now if you do decide to follow the Flog trail, make it real. Don’t just put junk articles on the Flogs, take your time and write some decent information. Think about previous articles that you have written on any of your Blog posts on other sites and decide if they would be appropriate to insert a short sentence or two in a previous post and include your anchor text link to…where else?

Another form of a Flog is a miscellaneous or catch-all type of Blog that has no particular theme and might have hundreds of Blog posts in any given category. You will have to be a little creative to come up with ideas on how to build such a site full of content in all different fields, but may I suggest perhaps you think about “RSS”? Some of this content can come from automated feeds as mentioned and some you can easily get for a few dollars as in Private label Rights (PLR) articles.

Don’t bother to tell me about duplicate content because I don’t care to hear it. I know what works, of course not that I have ever tried it personally…

You also might find this site of interest Make Money Online with Niche Support. These people all seem to be master Floggers, not that I would know of course…

Here is another cool place to get as many free links as you feel like applying for.  1 Family Classifieds will let you run free classified ads in any subject category and when you insert your free ad you can make an html anchor text hyperlink. Now don’t that just kick ass?

One new thing that you will notice here on the Blogging Make Money Blog at http://Linkmoney.org is that I have added the plugin for “Top Commentator.” See it over there on the right? Every month the top 5 (for now) commentators will receive a do-follow link in my sidebar. Just leave a good comment and you will be entered. Spammers will be banned.

So how about you? Are you ready to Flog?
Backlinks are very important you know.