Online Business Freedom

I have mixed feelings about Alexa’s website traffic ranking.

Here is what Wikipedia says about the accuracy of the Alexa Toobar:

“Alexa ranks sites based on visits from users of its Alexa Toolbar for Internet Explorer and from integrated sidebars in Mozilla and Netscape.

In addition to their own status bar extension, Sparky (released July 2007), there are several third-party extensions for Mozilla Firefox:

SearchStatus shows Google PageRank and Alexa TrafficRank

About This Site Firefox plug-in that shows metadata from Alexa TrafficRank.

There is some controversy over how representative Alexa’s user base is of typical Internet behavior. If Alexa’s user base is a fair statistical sample of the Internet user population (e.g., a random sample of sufficient size), Alexa’s ranking should be quite accurate.

In reality, not much is known about the sample and possible sampling biases. Alexa itself notes several examples.^[12][13] A known source of bias is the self-selecting, opt-in nature of Alexa traffic tracking software installation, but the significance of this bias on rankings is not reported.”

But the bottom line is — your Alexa ranking is a pretty straightforward way to measure your web traffic.

If you have nothing to compare your progress to, how do you know if you’re improving?

When I started this blog on my birthday, on January 29^th, my Alexa ranking was something like 6,600,000.

Through a few key traffic methods, and a lot of help from more experienced Internet Marketers, my ranking slowly began going up.

In a couple weeks it was around the four million mark.

A couple weeks after that it was in the high millions.

A few weeks later it plateaued for a while at around 1,200,000. Not sure why.

But I checked yesterday and saw that I had broken the million mark.

Right now my blog has an Alexa ranking of 819,325.

For some this may not seem very significant, but for me it’s a major milestone, and positive sign that the blog is going the direction I want it to.

So that’s the update.

If you don’t have a way to measure your site’s traffic, download the Alexa Toolbar. At the very least you can have a straightforward tool to monitor your web traffic.

-James D. Lee

PS - Again, on May 6th I’ll be posting an update on the results of my traffic experiment and the methods I used. It’s still a couple months yet, but just a reminder for you

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