My Blogging Business

If you are serious about your blogging business, Alexa is something you must not give a miss. Alexa ranking is one of the most important traffic indicators for advertiser and monetization platform. Many plubisher will look at your Alexa ranking to estimate the visitor volume and traffic, from there deriving the cost for placing ads in your site or blog.If you have signed up ReviewMe or Text-link-Ads and Sponsored Reviews, you will have realized that these 2 monetization platform calculate your ad selling cost base on your Alexa ranking.

How Alexa works?

Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users. The information is sorted, sifted, anonymized, counted, and computed, until, finally, they get the traffic rankings shown in the Alexa service.

What is Traffic Rank?

The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis. The main Alexa traffic rank is based on the geometric mean of these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users). The three-month change is determined by comparing the site’s current rank with its rank from three months ago. For example, on July 1, the three-month change would show the difference between the rank based on traffic during the first quarter of the year and the rank based on traffic during the second quarter.

What are Page Views?

Page views measure the number of pages viewed by Alexa Toolbar users. Multiple page views of the same page made by the same user on the same day are counted only once. The page views per user numbers are the average numbers of unique pages viewed per user per day by the users visiting the site. The three-month change is determined by comparing a site’s current page view numbers with those from three month ago.

Myth of Alexa Ranking is Not Accurate!

If you have done some researches, people are saying that Alexa ranking is not accurate enough, is it true? I guess depending on how you look at it. It is true that there is a bias in using Alexa ranking and the reason being Alexa can only calculate your traffic volume only if you have included the Alexa tracker on your website or your visitors have an Alexa toolbar. That helps Alexa to track your traffic volume. The primary way for Alexa to determine your traffic volume is by their tookbar, only people with the Alexa toolbar installed and visit your website will be tracked. So is it accurate, you decided?

Let’s face a fact, Alexa toolbar is not that popular and not many people will install Alexa toolbar. Only webmaster or more computer savvy people will install Alexa toolbar for SEO or traffic purposes. Normal web surfer will not bother to install Alexa toolbar. But if you have the Alexa tracker on every pages of your website. Alexa will be able to count the traffic volume more reliably.

So install your Alexa Widget now! Is free anyway!
Alexa Ranking Improvement: Add a Alexa Tracker on Every Pages

I mentioned earlier that Alexa ranking has a bias. Why is that so, the reason is simple if you understand how Alexa tracks traffic as explained in the earlier paragraph. Alexa ranking tends to track the search volume for website which is more tech savvy people, so, it compares the websites among those with Alexa tracker. If I have a 1 millions visitors a day but I do not have Alexa tracker on my site, you can see a lousy alexa tracking still.

Now, even though Alexa is bias is not totally accurate, it is still the favorite indicator among ads publisher, especially blogging advertising tools like sponsored review and text link ads. If you like you sell ads space, the publisher still likes to know your Alexa ranking despite its biaseness. So you better get it done, or regret! Time is a key factor!

Now, this comes to marketing, Alexa ranking is simple one of the marketing trick you must use to boost your website or blog value… Do not deny the fact that people just like to see the number even though it is not 100% accurate. This is a number game!
Well, just concentrate your effort to build up your traffic, do your regular blog commenting and social bookmarking, all visits will be tracked and naturally you will see your Alexa shooting rocket high.

Good luck
Jack Lan
http://www.moneyfromblog.com

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As a blogger, you must be very familiar with social bookmarking sites since it is one of the most effective marketing strategy. The problem is there are too many different type of social bookmarking sites out there, and have you ever wonder which are the best one?

By recognizing the most popular and highest ranking social bookmarking sites and make use of them, it can help you maximize your blog page rank very fast and get maximum traffic to your blog.

Below is one of the research done on the Top 10 most popular social bookmarking sites.
1) Digg

• PageRank: 8
• Unique Monthly Visitors: 15,647,361
• Alexa Rank: 91

2 ) Netscape

• PageRank: 9
• Unique Monthly Visitors: 5,251,829
• Alexa Rank: 562

3 ) Technorati

• PageRank: 8
• Monthly Unique Visitors: 3,563,581
• Alexa Rank: 198

4 ) Del.icio.us

• PageRank: 8
• Monthly Unique Visitors: 1,032,489
• Alexa Rank: 201

5 ) StumbleUpon

• PageRank: 8
• Monthly Unique Visitors: 698,601
• Alexa Rank: 316

6 ) Reddit

• PageRank: 7
• Monthly Unique Visitors: 776,298
• Alexa Rank: 838

7 ) SlashDot

• PageRank: 9
• Monthly Unique Visitors: 282,967
• Alexa Rank: 462

8 ) Fark

• PageRank: 7
• Monthly Unique Visitors: 212,274
• Alexa Rank: 1,614

9 ) BlinkList

• PageRank: 6
• Monthly Unique Visitors: 146,858
• Alexa Rank: 3,826

10 ) Newsvine

• PageRank: 7
• Monthly Unique Visitors: 104,117
• Alexa Rank: 3,739

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What is market research? Market research for internet or blogging business is actually doing search about finding out if  there is a local or national market for the product or service: be it the price, quality, quantity etc. Most of such research is done on online shopping malls, selling platform or auction site. So is it important for all blogger to do detail market research. The answer is no, not all.

If you have downloaded my business flow chart, you would have know there are generally 3 types of blogs you can build. The 3 different types of blog are personal blog, passion blog and niche market blog. If you are doing a personal blog, it is not nesscary for you to do a market research. For passion blog, it depend a lot on the topic you are writing about and how serious you want to monetize it. For niche market blog, you must do extensive research to ensure a profitable blog business.

So the next question is how do I do a market research?

But before any market research, you must first look for a general topic you want to write about. Below are some examples you can use to brainstorm :

• Computing
• scholarships
• Writers
• Mystery Shopping
• Vegeterian
• Marriage
• Smoking
• Golf
• Wedding
• Cars
• Healthy Living
• Detox

So all these are some of recent few hot markets, good things about blogging are you don’t really need to be as specific as compare to the usual internet business. You can write generally on certain topics and focus into the sub topics will writing later.

For passion blog, you need to identify your skills and interests. So how do you find a market with a common problem? Wel, since they are going to be your future customers, you should probably look for people you have something in common with.  You will be much more passionate about your business if you sell something that really captures your interest to people who share that same interest.

That why I strongly recommend that all would be entrepreneurs base their business on their own personal skills and interests. Before you even begin brainstorming possible markets to target, you need to seriously consider the following:

• What are you interested in?
• What are you passionate about?
• What subject or topic do you have a lot of knowledge about?
• What are people always coming to you for advice about?

Whether it is expertise you picked up on the job, skills you developed through a hobby or interest in a subject you have long wanted to explore further, just about every single skill or interest you have is something that can become the foundation for a successful blog business.

Top 5 Questions to Find Your Skills & Interests

1. If you had a million dollars and a week worth of free time, what would you do? List the first activities that come to mind.
2. What websites do you visit when you are just surfing around online?
3. Have you ever won a trophy or awards? Have you ever been recognize for a contribution of services?
4. Do you have any collection or hobbies
5. Is there anything you have ever really wanted to do or learn but just haven’t had the time for?

Reach your niche market

Don’t worry if your area of expertise seems too obscure or specialized. The beauty of the internet is that it is the perfect medium for targeting highly specialized markets. A product that is difficult to sell in a small market because there is not enough demand for it can be a best-seller on the internet, where you are able to sell your product to a global market.

How to do market research?

1. Get started with the search engine like google.com, yahoo.com and msn.com
2. check out news sites and ezines
3. Look for business already selling
4. Check out the forums related your market
5.  Free and low cost tools to help you with your research
   1. http://www.MoneyFromBlog.com/links.html

Woow, looks like I have given you a lot to do. Don’t worry, though it might seem like a lot of work, you should be able to complete all this research in a matter of days. With our coaching program video, you can easily do it in a few hours. To get MFB Coaching program, visit us at http://www.MoneyFromBlog.com

Next posting I will be sharing with you how to make use of Wordtracker for blogging business market research. Meanwhile you can sign up for wordtracker free trial at http://www.moneyfromblog.com/wordtracker/

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I was doing my market search and realize that the link doesn’t exist anymore. This famous URL http://inventory.overture.com no longer works anymore. And Overture has transfered 90% of its page to Yahoo Search Marketing to date.

Wondering if there is another alternative similar site to research on Yahoo Search Result.

While surfing around, found this page from Google. It works almost similar to Overture Inventory. This URL is: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

In this Google Keyword External, you can search using the Keyword Variations or Site-Related Keywords.

Under the keyword variations, it will display all the search term with the keyword(s) you entered together with 3 statistic data, Advertiser Competition, previous month Search Volume, Avg monthly Search Volume . These data are rather useful even though they didn’t display the number like what Overture inventory used to do. Instead they uses bar display.

Other than using Google Keyword External, I also like to used Wordtracker.

Wordtracker is a very powerful tools that all serious internet marketer and online business owner need to have. If you are serious with your blogging business and wanted in increase your traffic from SEO or PPC marketing, this is a tools you must not miss. Personally I bought the 1 year membership which I can use unlimited number of time. It is rather expensive but of course if you just want to do a simple one time research, you can buy the 1 week or 1 month package.

Of course for a start, they are giving FREE trial. Click here to sign up for Wordtracker Free Trial Now!

Wordtracker is also giving a FREE Keyword Research Guide. You can download it here!

Lastly, you can also download the famous software Good Keyword Version 2.01. This is an award winning keyword research software that you can download for free, and the program is 100% free from spyware and adware.

Download Good Keyword Here!

So people who are are used to Overture Inventory can used the above few alternative keyword research platform. Good luck in your research!

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