LinkMoney.org

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.

I had the honor of being asked to do an audio interview about my experience with Internet marketing and Blogging by fellow BlogSuccess member, Beat Schindler.

So we did it last night over the telephone and Skype and Beat put the file up on his Blog this morning.  Beat is quite the interviewer and he drew out history and background and some personal information that you might find of interest.

I also gave some good tips on how to get started Blogging and gave some of the Blogging Make Money ideas that have worked for me, and was also allowed to talk about my favorite business venture, 3rd Party Blog.

What many business owners do not realize yet is that there are services such as ours that will take over the whole Blogging program for your company, from start to finish.

3rd Party Blog is not just an article writing service.  We do the whole thing, we come up with an appropriate Blog name, we procure the hosting for you, we install the WordPress Blog, and we install all of the plugins and gadgets that will make your Blog shine really bright in the eyes of the robots that spider your website.

Our team also does the market research, competition research, and keyword reasearch to get your new company Blog noticed by the search engines.  Our writers are expert at writing keyword emphasized Blog posts that will bring your site right up closer to the front of the pack.

Go ahead and listen to the audio interview by clicking on the link below, and if you have any questions please contact me.

Zigzag Chats: Rich Hill

Update 9/23/09

Beat sent me a copy of the audio file directly to include on this website.

The audio was run through a filter to clean up the noise a little.

You may listen to the interview here:

Here is a new social networking site, Echodemic dot com, that allows you to cross-post your Blog articles and have them voted (echoed) on.

Echodemic dot com is in Beta and by the number of Blog posts it must have just started recently. It is sort of a DIGG like experience except that you post your whole article on their site and their readers and members get to read it and give it an “Echo” vote.

The articles that receive the most echoes move to the front page of Echodemic and you will get interested parties coming back to your website to see what else you have to offer.

This could be a great free traffic generator and will bring the type of visitor that is interested in what you have to say.

I just posted my first article and it does not have any echoes yet, but it should be fairly easy to move to the front page because it is so new that the highest echo count for most of the “best of” are only around seven (now 15) echoes or so.

I would really appreciate it if you readers of this Blog would go there and check it out. Click on the tab for “Most recent” posts and find mine that is titled “The Niche Doctor Cures WordPress Code,” and give it an “Echo.” I did alter the text a tiny bit from my Blog post of the same subject, but I don’t know if that is really necessary or not.

If you want to keep track of my posts, my user name is “linkmoneydotorg.”

Thanks much and you will no doubt want to register and become an Echodemic.com member also.

Everything is FREE of course.

I’m Rich !

ps:  This is an addition to this post.  I am asking three things of you readers.

1st – Please subscribe to this Blog with either the RSS or Email buttons.  (For six months I had them set up wrong and am just now rebuilding my subscriber base.)

2nd – Please give this post a thumbs up Stumble.  (I am not a big fan of StumbleUpon but did recieve a ton of new traffic from there today.)

3rd – Please visit Echodemic and give my post an echo (vote)  Only six more echoes needed to be in 1st place!  Thank you all so much.
http://www.echodemic.com/index.php?q=node/1357

I’m Rich !