Another Wordpress Blog

Here’s what you do on day three of setting up your big bucks blog: Make sure your blog hits are counted by the services that track blog hits.

To do this: visit this alexa page. Add the widget to your footer. Now, write a blog entry about whatever you really want to blog about.

Oh, so you want to know why you should do what I suggested? Well, ok.

The reason why you should do what I suggest is that is that if you eventually want to make some money blogging, you will need to convince advertisers you have visitors. That means you a) need visitors and b) need to get the tracking services to count them!

Day three is the time to start making sure the few visitors you get when you first start blotting get counted. Alexa is the first service you want to alert. There are other services, but for now don’t worry about them. I’ll tell you about Alexa today and Quantcast tomorrow!

So, what’s Alexa? Alexa is traffic service is widely used by services that pay you to blog. Many of the for pay opportunities, like PayPerPost, use their statistics to evaluate your blog. The higher your 3 month average ranking the more money you can make.

Ok, so why do you need to even worry about Alexa. It seems like if you just start getting traffic, your your rank will increase, right? Well, sort of. But believe it or not, these ranking systems need a help from you because they aren’t very efficient at counting traffic! (Proof to follow.)

The reason they aren’t efficient has to do with how does Alexa counts visitors. To count, they do three things:

1. Alexa has managed to persuade a number of people to install a toolbar on their browser. If those people visit your site, Alexa counts the visit. So, you could try to get your site visitors to install the toolbar. But you are a new blog. You don’t have visitors.
2. Alexa has something called an alexa redirect. It’s a pain in the neck. It’s such a pain in the neck, I’m not going to tell you how to do it. Don’t bother.

And

3. Alexa lets you stick a widget or counter on your site: This is easy and really helps you get your visits counted.

So, if you didn’t already do it, do this: Click here. Then enter your domain name in either the widget or traffic rank box, then add the javascript to your blog footer or sidebar. (If you scroll down, you’ll see this in my footer. It’s a little box. I have no traffic, so it tells you they have no data. That’s ok for now.)

What does the widget do? It makes sure that Alexa counts the visits to your site whether or not a visitor has installed an Alexa toolbar.

Does it make a difference? Well, you won’t notice the any miraculous effect if you install the traffic rank box on a blog that’s just been created. After all, no one is visiting yet. But, I added this counter to this blog which had tonsof traffic for three years. But look at the Alexa traffic rank graph? According to Alexa, my daily traffic rank was in the toilet, but suddenly zoomed in mid April of 2007. Well, my traffic hasn’t changed at all. The only thing that changed is now Alexa is counting my traffic.

Advertisers will only pay if they believe you have traffic. And they believe Alexa, not you. So, if you want Alexa to count your traffic, add a counter. That’s the key.

Now in case you ignored me the first two times, let me repeat: Right now, visit this alexa page. Add the widget to your footer. Then write a blog post about what ever you want to blog about.

Then come back tomorrow and read the next article in this series.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007 at 11:04 am and is filed under Rankings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.