Alexa drives me out of bed every morning

One thing that every blogger knows is that when you start taking blogging seriously, you end up working really hard. It doesn’t seem to matter whether you’re blogging for fun, doing it because you want to talk about things you are passionate about, or whether you want to blog to make money. Whatever your motivation, blogging can be hard work. There is so much to do. But your blog can also be inspiring.

I mentioned in my blog post yesterday about my Alexa rating. An awesome blogger, a truly talented funny guy called Charlie Nitric asked me what this was. So I thought I would write a blog about it. Check out his blog, here it is Charlie Nitric.

Alexa is the thing that drives me out of bed every morning. I open my eyes, and the first thing that pops into my mind is my blog. Then I wonder to myself what is my blogs Alexa rating today. I shoot out of bed, head to my lap top, and ready myself. I raise the top, sign in, and call up my blog. You feel your nerve ends stand up, and wait for the Alexa tool bar to tell you where you stand in the rankings. It either leaves you feeling elated, or right down in the dumps.

Let me explain. Alexa is a very powerful tool used to rank web site traffic. It gives you an indication of your web site traffic and where your blog stands in the blogosphere! Some people love it, others hate it. To me it is just a tool to give me an idea of whether what I’m doing is being appreciated, whether it’s being read, whether people like it.

Here is what it tells me about mine today:

Healthylifestylesliving.com three-month global Alexa traffic rank is 348,930. The site has a bounce rate of approximately 27% (i.e., 27% of visits consist of only one pageview), and the time spent in a typical visit to the site is roughly eighteen minutes, with 48 seconds spent on each pageview. Visitors to Healthylifestylesblog.co.uk view an average of 9.6 unique pages per day. This site has attained a traffic rank of 10,963 among users in the UK, where approximately 69% of its audience is located.

Alexa Ranking is a measure of the traffic coming to your blog. It’s usefulness is in question for some sites, but it at least gives you an indication of how it’s doing. A lower Alexa score is considered “better” and is associated with a blog or website getting a higher amount of incoming traffic.

I believe it only counts those who visit your site and have the Alexa toolbar. Anyone can download the toolbar for free which is automatically added to your browser and tracks the sites you’re visiting. Increasing visits from those who do not have the Alexa toolbar installed will not help your Alexa ranking. Follow this link to get yourself the Alexa toolbar.

When I first came to know about the Alexa ranking, I found I was just over 3 million. This was back in February 2011. Seeing my number lower always renews my energy to blog. It tells me that people are actually reading what I write.

This is what I believe the Alexa Ranking shows:

If your blog is Over 1,000,000 you are receiving very little traffic

For those between 500,000-1,000,000 you are probably doing ok, and attracting visitors, so you are being read.

Blogs between 250,000-500,000 are generating a respectable amount of traffic.

Those reaching the heights of 100,000-250,000 are getting good traffic and are starting to be seen as successful.

Now those between 20,000-100,000 are seen as a serious successful blog, and you are definitely reaching the heights of the blogging world.

The place many of us bloggers dream of reaching is the 1,000-20,000 range where you are now an A-Rated blogger. You could probably quit your day job because by now you would be making descent money.

If you ever reach 1-1,000 as a blogger, I’d guess you’d never need to worry about money, number of visitors or anything at all. You have reached the top of the mountain.

I know there are other good indicators. The one that sometimes lowers my happiness is the lack of comments I sometimes have. This is an area I’m trying to find a way to create more interaction on my blog. Others look at page views and visits. Not that long ago, I was happy that I got 20 unique visitors daily. Since my daily average has reached 250 plus, that tells me yes I’m getting somewhere. 3000 a month for someone struggling not that long ago to get 500 in a month, does make me pretty contented. For others it’s the amount of money they make. This isn’t something I do blogging for, so the little I get from Adscence every month well that’s great because it pays for my hosting and internet costs. The number of Subscribers – how many people subscribe to your blog using either the RSS feed or email subscription is another good indicator. But to me that magic number Alexa shows me every day is what fuels my day, and gets me sitting at my lap top writing my posts.

Every blogger has a different set of goals and objectives and their own way of measuring their success. If you have blogged for years and still getting no comments per post and 10 page views per day, and a alexa ranking of 3 million plus, you are doing something wrong.

You can get the Alexa Widgets for your blog which will show your blog’s Alexa traffic rank and links to your blog. If your blog is having a good Alexa rank and number of links then go ahead and show off that using this widget. Here is the link for Alexa Widget Page.

I will always continue to enjoy blogging. It is such a powerful way to get your information across to people, and help them to make positive changes in their life. But I admit I will also continue trying to boost my Alexa Ranking, increase my traffic (unique visitors), better engage my readers (comments) and provide content they were truly interested in receiving (subscribers).

I’m sure that many of you will have others ways to monitor the success of your blog that I’ve not mentioned here – so I’ll ask the question…How do you measure success on your blog?

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