So, as you might have noticed in my previous post, I realized that Alexa is shifting its rankings and blogs in the Make Money Online scene seem to be getting hurt pretty hard.

I am not sure where Alexa is getting their new statistics and information that they are using to create their rankings, but it isn’t friendly to my niche.

I took a quick look at the top five blogs from the Top 50 list of Make Money Online Blogs I compiled, and all of them show huge drops in their Alexa rankings since the start of the year.

Darren works hard on Problogger, and I doubt over the last half a year that his blog could have dropped so far in rankings compared to other blogs. I would actually hazard a guess that his blog actually continues to grow in traffic, links, and other support, so why is his ranking dwindling away?

It is still fairly high compared to most sites, but the drop is very apparent.

Here are the other four top blogs in the top fifty list, and as you can plainly see, all of them have experienced a similar drop.

Not all of them seem to be effected in exactly the same way, but all of them have experienced a large drop. Some blogs have dropped faster, and harder than others, and I can’t really see any rhyme or reason for the drop. If they were all exactly the same, at the same time, then I could understand that it was just an overall shift in how Alexa compiles their rankings, but I have to conclude that their data sources are effecting their calculations in what almost appears to me an unfair way.

This blog is not safe from the drop either, as my Alexa rank has been sinking as well, despite my best efforts to find ways to attract unique visitors, and even more so, visitors that would be using the Alexa Toolbar, in hopes if it boosting my rank.

Why Does This Matter?

This wouldn’t normally be a concern for most bloggers, and I can see some people reading this post and putting on their hater pants. “Alexa is irrelevant, every idiot knows that,” they might say, but the fact of the matter is that certain sites use Alexa ranking to determine position, including PerformancingAds, where sites are listed in order of best to worst Alexa rank, and I have no doubt that those with higher visible rankings will secure more advertising than those that are lower down the page.

It is also taken into consideration when compiling things like my top 50 list of make money online blogs, as I compile the list from the 45n5.com/top100 list, which places sites based on Google PageRank, Technorati Ranking and Alexa Ranking.

Originally posted on August 2, 2008 @ 12:15 pm

When I first started this blog, it was just a place for me to write things that I couldn’t write anywhere else. It was a place for me to talk about all that I have learned over the last three years. But when Mark added the Top 100 list at 45n5.com, I started to create goals for this blog beyond expanding the blog by at least one more unique visitor each month.

I wanted to get into the top one hundred, and then the top fifty, and then the top thirty. Today, I am sitting in the top twenty. I can’t see myself rising much higher, but I enjoyed having goals and a strange sense of competition.

I didn’t let the fact that I was competing really change the blog, but it lit a fire under me to get more done on this site than I might have otherwise been able to.

I worked on building vast amounts of content, pushed my networking skills as hard as possible to get inbound links, spent some money on having WordPress themes developed so I could release them for even more attention, and worked on building up my traffic so that I could continue to rise up the ranks.

I watched as my competitors blogs faded as they lost interest. I waited as Google re-assessed their PageRank system, assigning new higher ranks to me, and less high ranks to many of my competitors. I added the Alexa toolbar on my web browser to attempt to give me one more vote to push my rank just that little bit higher, and wrote about Alexa on a few occasions in hopes of drawing in their user base to increase my rank even more.

I worked hard on trying to build a community while also focusing on improving the ranks that would help me achieve my goals. I didn’t take any big short cuts, and my continued growth is in part because I continued on while others gave up.

Having a person to compete with can really help those of us that have problems with inspiration or issues sticking to a single task for a long period of time. You don’t have to be the best, but you should want to do better than a fair number of your peers and thus competitors.

Who are you competing with, and why? Or if you are a person that doesn’t enjoy competition, how do you inspire yourself to continue moving forward? Let me know in the comments below.

Originally posted on July 9, 2008 @ 2:19 pm