While sifting through another batch of spam yesterday, I ran across a tactic that I do not see very often but is still somewhat interesting. I am not sure about its effectiveness, however.
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Although often criticized by webmasters, the Alexa traffic ranking is still viewed by many in the general public as an indicator of a website’s importance. More importantly for Internet marketers, it is used as a gauge for estimating a site’s advertising value. In this article, I will discuss the importance of the Alexa system and its weaknesses as it relates to marketing and website promotion. Then I will list 10 simple ways in which you can increase both your Alexa rank and your income potential. These methods were derived from an excellent article found at DoshDosh.com entitled 20 Quick Ways to Increase Your Alexa Rank.
What exactly is the Alexa rank?
The Alexa rank is a system that collects historical traffic data from users of the Alexa toolbar or Firefox Search Status extension and uses this to determine the relative rankings of websites for the previous three months. It is based on the combined total of global reach and page views for each site. The reach is a percentage of all Internet users who visit your site within a specific time period (usually 3 months). Page views are determined by calculating the number of pages within each website that are visited by users of the toolbar within a 24-hour period.
Well, this was a nice little surprise. After mailing off another three survey checks for a total deposit of $138 in Survey Vanguard profits last night, I returned to my inbox and found this email with the title of “One Question Survey; Earn $5″:
You have participated in a beverage study and we just have one more question for you.
If you qualify and complete this survey, you’ll receive $5. In addition, you can play the Instant Win game and be entered into our $25,000 sweepstakes. If you have questions about this survey, please reference survey number 666524.
Survey length: 1 minute
Click here to begin:
[active link was placed here]
The administrator of RoyalSurf.com sent out a correction notice regarding yesterday’s email update. It definitely ranks as one of the most sincere apology letters that I have ever seen from a traffic exchange admin before.
Apparently there was some mistake in the last email that made it seem like users could purchase “weekly priority rotation slots” for 30 days. In reality, as the name implies, they were only supposed to last for 7 days. This one had me feeling a little embarrassed as well; I had received yesterday’s email and read through it, yet somehow I missed the obvious logical fallacy. Here is the text of today’s email under the title, “Critical Correction Enclosed”:
Yesterday, while searching through some of my regular blog sites, I followed a link to a site called TylerCruz.com and discovered an almost unbelievable case of affiliate marketing failure. After a 15-day “plunge” into the world of PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising, this site owner managed to lose $927.70 and even posted this screenshot to “brag” about it.
While it is normally not very nice to criticize another webmaster like this right out of the box, I am hoping that in this particular case we can extract some positive lessons from it. This little experiment has provided an excellent case study for newbies who may be considering a similar foray into the world of affiliate marketing. As I see it, our test subject here has made five classic newbie mistakes that we can use as learning opportunities in our quest for money-making enlightenment.
1. Jumping into an overly competitive niche
Tyler’s first mistake was choosing four niches that already had lots of competition. This almost always spells trouble for beginners. They will either wind up paying too much per click and lose money, or they will get very few impressions for their ads because they will not be able to make it onto the first page of Google AdWords, Overture, etc. Tyler managed to do both of these; he only got one impression for his ads on the first day even though he had lots of keywords. Then in an effort to get more clicks, he raised his bid prices to ridiculously high levels (he was up to $3 cost per click at one point). Not surprisingly, the results were unfavorable.
Two pieces of survey-related mail arrived today. One was a $60 check from an online focus group that I had participated in about two weeks ago, and the other is a regular mail-in questionnaire about health issues.
Although this is an area where my current skill set leaves something to be desired, I know that high quality content alone will not guarantee traffic or inbound links. Design matters too; if the appearance of a site is so unappealing that it drives visitors away, then they will not even bother to read my carefully crafted content. So after researching this subject and combining my findings with comments from other people on this issue, I have discovered 8 simple ways in which a blog’s design can be improved without having to spend lots of money on web development.
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UPDATE 11/24/08: Coke has extended the rewards program again — see the bottom of this article for the full update information.
The Coca-Cola company has extended the duration of its rewards program from the old end date of April 16, 2007 to a new ending date of January 31, 2008. This is good news for those of us who are collecting reward points from bottle caps and boxes; we will have several more months to save up points and redeem them for prizes.
Being an Internet marketer who has been making (and sometimes losing) money online since 2004, I have joined lots of programs, registered at many sites, and opted in to many other marketers’ email lists. Not surprisingly, this has resulted in a fair amount of spam mails flowing into my inbox over time.
A few weeks ago, as I was going through the daily ritual of deleting all of the obvious spam emails, I got the idea of saving some of these documents to use as examples of how both spammers and legitimate marketers will attempt to bypass your mental filters and reel you in to make that all-important sale. So after saving a sufficient number of emails, I decided to make an “Adventures in Spam” series so that I could showcase the various types of spam and spammer tactics, and also warn readers about possible scams lurking within this unsolicited content.
Yesterday, I was checking out a site called Helium and found a particularly useful post on the forum there that gives us some clues about how to make money by writing articles and getting paid for them.
The original thread starter, posting under the username of “flashemolecule”, discovered that although it is possible to build up a small income over time by writing good quality articles and publishing them at Helium, much more money can be made by using those same articles and selling them to other sites that will pay people for writing content. Fortunately, although Helium retains lifetime usage rights to your article after it has been published on their site (unless you specifically ask them to remove an article and they agree to it), they do not claim exclusive rights, which means that we have the opportunity to build up multiple streams of income from the same article. For example, if you write an article at one site and manage to make $5 from it, you can probably make that same amount or more by selling the same article to other sites such as Constant-content or Associated Content.
This morning I have received a Spam email pretending to originate from Regions Bank. As a public service, I want to relay this information to any readers of this site who may be current customers because I have examined the text and determined that it is almost certainly a phishing scam.
The subject line of the email reads:
Regions Bank corporate customer cervice: urgent security notice! (message id: w32732174227357)
Note that the spammer cannot spell the word “service” correctly. This should be your first clue that this email may not be entirely legitimate! Here is the actual text:
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