Breaking into Alexa’s Top 100,000 Sites
Douglas Karr at 4:22 pmIt took six months of hard work, but today I checked Alexa and have broken the 100,000 mark (3 month average).
If I were to estimate, I would probably say 10 to 20 hours per week on my blog for the last 6 months has gotten me there. I was really hoping to have nailed it before the New Year, but I’m okay with the 2 days extra.
Why am I sharing this? As with anything else, I think it’s great to set goals for yourself. Alexa is the closest thing I have to an ‘Internet Ranking’ so it tells me how my site is doing against all others. Technorati provides how my blog is doing against others. I’m under 12,000 and hope to make the top 5,000 blogs by the end of the year.
What am I doing differently? I’ve done a couple redesigns, some search engine optimization, some tweaking of my templates, lots of blog commenting on other blogs, plenty of trackbacks… but mostly I’ve tried to stay very true to my vision of what my blog should be doing. I want to share information frankly with respect to marketing and automation.
My topics vary widely, sometimes adding some bouts of personal information (so you know me personally) to topics on programming (a part of every modern marketer’s life - directly or indirectly), advertising and how the landscape of customer attention is changing, blogging and how it really does help marketing, and of course my periodic rants.
It seems to be a working well, and I’m glad you are enjoying it. Please let me know if there’s other topics you’d like to see me cover. And of course, I’ll continue to speak to you directly about the challenges I’m facing with regard to marketing technologies!
I’ve had my ups and downs with the Alexa ranking because sometimes it seems to be right on and other times it doesn’t reflect my actual raw server logs.
Have you experienced this?
For laughs and giggles, I just checked my site and my blog traffic rank was 55,284.
Based on your post, I assume that’s a good thing?
I’ve only recently, the past year or so been concerned with my site stats.
I just do what I do and keep on trucking. Once in a while I poke in on stats and either say “wow” or “uh oh”.
Keep up the good work Doug. Your blog is becoming one nice resource.
“Wow” and “Uh Oh” are definitely what I’m after. I work hard at the blog so the last thing I want to see is that I’m putting off folks rather than acquiring and keeping subscribers. It’s simply a measure of my performance.
It’s also a great indicator since I consult a number of other clients on their blogs. If I can’t grow my own reach, I’m not sure they should be listening to me! It’s a lot like hiring an SEO expert that isn’t in the top 10… don’t bother!
Congratulations! Being the token nerd in my office I’ve done a good deal of SEO work myself trying to get our blog noticed and read. We’ve been moving up in Alexa as well but haven’t yet broken the 100K 3-month mark. So I know EXACTLY how hard it can be.
Thanks for a good blog, keep at it.
Chris Kieff at MSCO
http://www.msco.com/blog
Written by the Author of “YOUR MARKETING SUCKS” Mark Stevens
Personally, I measure site success by how useful it is and by feedback. A way of quantifying that for me is by looking at my server’s web stats and watching a steady trend of increased traffic.