Strategic Marketing: Using Deadlines and Discounts

Strategic marketing means promoting your products and services with a clear cut plan. Like most small business marketing consultants, I do a MUCH better job of doing this with my clients than I do in applying strategic marketing practices to my own stuff.

If you didn’t know it before, you should learn this now; it’s HUMAN NATURE to procrastinate! It’s why coupons have expiration dates, it’s why businesses have limited time SALES. There’s not better way to motivate buyers to ACT NOW than to impose a deadline! Putting a deadline on a discount is essential.

A discount without a deadline is simply a price cut.

Creating a deadline is a good marketing strategy. So, when I offered my Fast Track to Blogging Success for free, I put a deadline on that discount. The deadline has now passed – and the 100% discount is now over.

However, as I went in to remove the code, I remembered how I HATED it when I wasn’t able to get Naomi’s report when I missed the boat.

It was time to “enforce” my own deadline – and I was faced with a dilemma. If I didn’t remove the 100% discount, I’m a liar. If I remove it, then someone’s going to try to use the discount because they got here late and it won’t work. Then, forever more, if they ever think about “Virtual Impax,” it will cause “bad vibes”.

Talk about a “no win” situation!

So, instead of REMOVING the discount, I just reduced it. The discount code “CathRocks” now takes $10 off the $24.95 price.

Add to Cart

If you got it for free – then you still got a bargain, however if you’re late to the party – you can still pick it up at a discount.

However, in order for this discount to be “motivating” it still needs a deadline. Otherwise, it’s simply a thinly veiled attempt at a price cut. So the deadline is now moved to November 1 for the “CathRocks” discount code which was originally offered to readers of Cath Lawson’s OUTSTANDING blog.

If you haven’t checked out her blog, you should.  She definitely offers business advice from the “been there, done that, bought the T-shirt AND the factory which produces the T-shirts”  point of view.    Cath is a serial entrepreneur – and honestly, I don’t think there’s any other kind of entrepreneur.  She shares her wisdom with a healthy dose of wit via her blog on a regular basis.    In other words, she’s the’s the real deal and it shows!

Social Media Warning: I am Rubber – You are Glue …

Remember that chant – back when you were a child. Someone would say something mean or hateful, and your response would be the sing-song, “I am rubber – you are glue! Whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks to YOU!”

Web 2.0 gives us a real opportunity to share our thoughts spontaneously. Whether it’s posting to your own blog, making comments on other blogs or sending bulletins via MySpace – sometimes we might share things we wish we hadn’t. If we’re lucky, the rest of the world will be so self absorbed that most people won’t notice when we expose more than we planned.

I recently got a notification about an article which is getting a lot of attention on one of the various social networking sites to which I belong.  The article was written by a member who is telling business owners to get control over their personal spending lest it ruin their business. I think I’ve gotten more insight to her spending habits than she may have been planning on providing.  I thought it was just common sense, but if you want to promote your services as a financial manager, don’t tell me how many checks you’ve bounced in the past few weeks!

Meanwhile, the article makes me laugh because I am currently working with a client who has EXACTLY the opposite problem. This client is processing her own credit card orders manually because she doesn’t want to PAY an assistant to do this menial task for her. As a result, it’s taking WEEKS for some orders to get processed – money that could be safely in her bank account – less a small fee for hiring an assistant to handle the order processing.

We’re in the process of automating this process for her, by the way so she doesn’t have to hire the assistant – however, she’s reluctant to make the investment needed to make this happen.  Her business is relatively new and she’s having trouble making the transition from “requisition forms” to “you’ve got to spend money to make money.”

I can TOTALLY relate to my client because I too have battled trying to achieve balance between the art of bootstrapping and being silly.

For example, I remember that I worried for MONTHS over the prospect of spending $35 per year to register my domain name (way back in 1998) and the subsequent hosting fee!  It took me a long time to get used to the idea that I had to SPEND money to MAKE money. I’ve learned that it’s just a part of the transition from “employee” to “business owner” and for some of us, it’s a tough hurdle to overcome.

Meanwhile, the world is full of therapists involved in horrible relationships who spend their days “fixing” other people’s relationships – doctors who smoke, drink and abuse drugs but reach out selflessly to heal their patients – accountants who can’t keep their own finances in order. The list goes on and on but a key player in this kind of behavior are the MMO bloggers who aren’t making any money.

While it’s true that “The cobblers’ own children rarely wear shoes,” if you want to convince others that you know your stuff – you’d better have some impressive samples.

As always, this is going to come BACK to blogging.  One of the reasons I ADORE blogs is that it’s hard to “fake” expertise over the course of 100 or more posts.  When these MMO pretenders post their monthly earnings and think $89 a month is a sign of their success – well, it’s yet another reasons I ADORE blogs!

If you’re not authentic – or if your SOLE purpose is trying to fleece the masses – then don’t launch a blog and DO NOT participate in social media marketing.    If you’re a pretender, your blog will expose you as one!

If on the other hand, your business is in the business of helping people solve their problems, achieve their goals or placate their desires – the step right up to blogging and Web 2.0.  While you won’t find OVERNIGHT success, you’ll find it’s a fun and fulfilling path to travel.

Your blog won’t be a 30 minute solution to your marketing dilemmas – it may not even earn $89 per month in direct income for you, but it will be great way to begin spreading the word about the solutions you offer!

What is YOUR blog worth?

Darren Rowse of ProBlogger is getting inundated with the news of the 1 Man Blog Sells for $15 Million Dollars

The question at the back of EVERY blogger’s mind when they hear news of a blog sale is, “I wonder how much MY blog would bring?”

For John Wu, the sole author of Bankaholic the answer is a cool $15 Million.

Darren reports:

the blog has an Alexa ranking of 42,168 and averages less than 20 comments per post. The blog does seem to rank very well for a lot of bank terms and I’m sure drives targetted traffic.

That’s the key – TARGETED TRAFFIC.  The blog buyer is Bankrate, which is acting very much like Google in this acquisition.  It’s the old,  “let someone ELSE do the hard work” and then the big guy with deep pockets sweeps in to collect.    John Wu got to perform the hard work – building up the blog over a period of 26 months.  He did the digging and Bankrate gets the gold and John’s labor is being WELL rewarded with a ROI of $576,923 per month for his efforts.

However, I think it’s important to remember that he didn’t launch this blog with this payday in mind. Instead he set out to create a tightly targeted blog focusing on attractive and tightly targeted keywords.  Now a big player wants his blog and is paying handsomely for John’s hard work.  Congratulations John.

Oh, and in a medium where community is everything, this blog is a bit light on that aspect.  Blog posts don’t get a lot of comments, but the blog delivers where it counts and that’s on desirable keywords and targeted traffic!

Oh, and for what it’s worth – Bankaholic is a WordPress blog.

Word of Mouth Marketing- Turns out what you don’t know CAN hurt you

Word of mouth marketing – it’s the holy grail for small business owners.  In the world of Web 2.0, word of mouth advertising is sometimes known as “viral marketing“. In any case, word of mouth advertising is where you rely on your satisfied customers to spread the word about your products or services.

Word of mouth marketing is a GREAT way to build a business when the message being carried by your customers is positive.   Heck, there is even Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association dedicated to promoting this method of marketing and advertising!

I have a love/hate relationship with word of mouth marketing.  I love that it’s powerful, it’s effective and best of all, it’s cheap!  I’ve built my business solely upon word of mouth marketing – which is the definition of irony because I help small business owners as a marketing consultant and I warn my clients NOT to rely solely upon Word of Mouth Marketing as their sole promotion tool to promote their business because ….

WORD OF MOUTH MARKETING SUCKS WHEN SOMEONE IS BAD MOUTHING YOUR SERVICES

Tomorrow marks the 4 week anniversary of the extraction of my wisdom tooth.  Unfortunately, this is a tale of how important trust can be when it comes to word of mouth marketing – especially when you’re  building a business and a brand.

My tale begins in classic Word of Mouth Marketing fashion.  I was asking friends if they knew of a good dentist and  I was referred to Southport Dental Clinic in Port St Lucie, FL.

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Best Kept Internet Marketing Strategies Secrets

One of the best kept internet marketing strategies is cross promotion and one of the best ways to illustrate this best kept internet marketing strategy secret is to illustrate it  in a case study.

The basics of cross promotion are really quite simple. First, you determine your target audience. In this case study, the company in the spotlight is iThemes, founded by Cory Miller.

Cory’s company sells WordPress Themes to bloggers. A WordPress Theme allows a blog owner to quickly and easily change the appearance of a blog with the click of a mouse. To make something that EASY for the user takes a LOT of work behind the scenes.

Now, you might be wondering why ANYONE would PAY for a WordPress theme when there are hundreds of thousands of FREE WordPress Themes floating around.

Remember when I said that to make something easy takes a lot of behind the scenes work – well, a lot of times those “free” themes are full of “bugs”. Some of those “bugs” will make it so the theme doesn’t display properly. I had a case with one free theme where the pages wouldn’t display properly. The client loved the look, but the code was such a mess it wasn’t usable. There are other cases where the “bugs” on those free themes means an outbound link from your blog to a blog in a less than desirable neighborhood on the internet.

After a typical blogger tires of fighting the good fight of trying to find a well coded, non-spam free theme, the next logical step is to is to move into the realm of PAID themes a.k.a PREMIUM themes.

This is the arena within which iThemes competes.

So, iThemes target customer is someone who is already a blogger. In many cases, they’re bloggers who have done the free theme route and are ready to make an small financial investment in their blog. (All of iThemes single use themes cost less than $100 which makes them very affordable.)  Most of these customers are familiar with the concept of FTP AND the basics of blogging.

The best kept internet marketing strategies secret for iThemes is to cross promote their business with a popular blog that writes about issues related to blogging.

This is the point where most people will stop reading and run off to find a blog to use for a cross promotion strategy.  This is the virtual equivalent of a small child running into heavy traffic.

STOP! LOOK! LISTEN!!!

This best kept internet marketing strategy is not quite that simple. If it were, then THIS wouldn’t be a BEST KEPT internet marketing strategies secret.  Here’s the SECRET part of the equation – and Daniel over at Daily Blog Tips delivers the secret in his post Drop A Comment if You Want to Win an iThemes Premium Theme

Pretty much every week someone emails me to offer some kind of free product or service. Most of the times, however, you can see that it is a blatant promotional effort, where the other side is just interested in getting some exposure for his stuff. On those cases I just ignore it. (emphasis is mine)

Sometimes, however, the freebies do have a good value for my readers, and on those occasions I am glad to cover them.

Did you catch that?   He told you the best kept internet marketing strategy secret of all time.  Did you see it?  It’s right there in the last line in the quote above,

Sometimes, however, the freebies do have a good value for my readers, and on those occasions I am glad to cover them.

Daniel knows his readers.   He knows who they are and what the need from him.  That’s why his blog is so successful.   (If you don’t know who yours are or who you want them to be, then pick up a copy of the 8 Week Power Blog Launch)  Daniel’s readers are ESTABLISHED bloggers seeking information on promoting and improving their blogs.

The secret is, when someone contacts him with a win/win/win proposition, Daniel – like every other successful blogger- is happy to oblige. In this case, offering a free WordPress iThemes theme is truly a win/win/win situation.

  • Daniel wins – he’s decided to use the freebie to increase comments on his blog post.
  • Daniel’s readers win – they get a chance to win a free premium  theme which is something many of them want.
  • Cory wins – Daniel’s readers have to say WHICH iThemes theme they want to win.  In order to do so, they must VISIT THE iThemes SITE!!!  They visit the site, see the tasty selection of beautiful themes and are asked to “fall in love” with one and post that preference within their comment.

Oh, Daniel and Cory both score additional “wins” on this promotion.  Cory wins AGAIn in the fact that not everyone who comments will be a lucky winner. Those who aren’t lucky winners are now classified as “hot prospects”.

Daniel wins again as well -because when new readers find this post after the promotion is over, they are likely to subscribe to the RSS so they’re sure to be ready for the next big give away!  So promotions like these help to build Daniel’s blog and help him attract new readers.   Oh, and Daniel wins a THIRD time on this -because other bloggers – like me – will write about his brilliant internet marketing strategy, which means more incoming links.

So the best kept internet marketing strategy secret begins with knowing your target customer.  Once you know who your target customer is, then you can find win/win/win cross promotional opportunities for your product or service.

New Business Development Process

I have been having new business development process issues coming up in consultations with clients lately so that’s usually a sign that I should write about it here.  This morning I saw that other blogs were talking about the new business development process, so this issue is obviously “bubbling up”for other people as well and not just my clients.

Mark over at Court’s Internet Marketing School leads the parade with his post, Money Always Flows to the Solution.

What problem does your website solve for its users?

Does the answer to that question fly off your lips? Did you have to think about it? Can you answer it even after thinking about it?

How about this – fill in the blanks in the following statement:

“I give my users _________ and I get ________ in return.”

In a few lines, Mark hits the nail on the head. His post kinda makes me embarrassed that I devoted an entire book to that very subject.  (Beyond the Niche: Essential Tools You Need to Create Marketing Messages that Deliver Results)

Then Naomi Dunford over at Itty Biz tells why this is a GREAT time to start your home based business.

Sell the right thing. Sell it to the right people. Hit the right trigger buttons. Do those things and you’ll be the richest person you know.

Ah – there’s the rub!  Sell the right thing.

Last week I told 2 different people to come back and talk to me when they have something to sell.  Their enthusiasm is high but they don’t have a product or a structured service to offer.  In essences, they couldn’t fill out Mark’s fill in the blank statement above.  It’s not just websites that have to fill in the blanks in the statement below, it’s a burning question for business owners as well:

“I give my users _________ and I get ________ in return.”

That is the hard part.  Developing a systematic way to fill in those two blanks in that sentence.

I’ve worked with small business owners for over a decade now on filling in those blanks.  I had one client who offers nutritional coaching services.  Her business wasn’t growing like she knew it could, so she and I spent three months working on her business model.  She had the generalities in place -she could fill in the blanks with the basics, ” I give my clients nutritional information and I get money in return.” However, she was a bit fuzzy on the process – something that she wasn’t clear on until we began working together.

Her business positively EXPLODED after we created a road map so to speak of her process.   We set up a “step one, step two, step three, step four” in her coaching process.  Even though she knew those steps in her head, it was positively AMAZING how quickly her business grew once she was able to outline for her potential clients the process.  In other words, she created a LABEL for the process – “A Four Step Process to Better Health” which helped her prospective clients wrap their brains around the service she provides.  As a result, her practice filled to over flowing, drawing clients to her Michigan based practice from as far away as Japan.

Lately, when I’ve been getting “HELP ME!” emails, I’m seeing a common thread.  People want to break free from the bondage of their 9-5 job and they’re desperate to break free.   That’s great and I agree with Naomi – there’s no better time than now to do so.  However, you have to be able to fill in the blanks if you want to make money – either online or off line.  The common thread is the desire to break free is there – but there isn’t a product or service to back desire up.  They can’t fill in the blanks in Mark’s statement –

“I give my users _________ and I get ________ in return.”

Skellie over at Problogger.net offers 10 innovative blog business models which can serve as inspiration for the ways others have created products and services which they use their blog to promote.

Developing a product can be as simple as creating an ebook or a membership site.   However, sometimes that’s easier said than done.

What product or service do you sell with your blog?  What process did you go through to create that product or service?

The Moral to the Story – Keep Your WordPress Installation Up to Date.

For those of you who don’t know how I pay the bills around here, I have this “savior” complex where in I try to save people from themselves.  While others hold their sides as they roll on the floor laughing at the idiots on YouTube who subject themselves to groin shots, I grimace in empathy.

As part of this complex, I launched a service known as Acumen Web Services where I sell self hosted  WordPress blogs to business people who are not geeks yet want to harness the power of the internet in their marketing.  At Acumen Web Services, I have a service known as “Cyber Angel” hosting.  This means that I’ll be responsible for keeping your WordPress blog up to date as part of your hosting with me.

I offer “Cyber Angel” hosting because I’ve watched clients take groin shot after groin shot  over the years and I don’t enjoy it one bit.

Here’s a word of advice:  If your web site is getting nice search engine action, BELIEVE ME the bad guys are hard at work finding a way to grab a piece of your hard earned success.

That’s what is happening with WordPress blogs.  Average, every day people are getting incredible results using WordPress self hosted blogs as their web presence.  Because of that success, there are bad guys (and gals) out there who are always looking for a way to siphon success from these hard working WordPress blogs.

As a result, the WordPress development team is always trying to keep one step ahead of the bad guys.  It’s a labor of love and it upsets me when people complain about the frequent updates.  They’re doing it for YOUR own good folks!

So, updating WordPress is essential.  If it’s too much for you, then get a free blog or hire someone to take care of YOUR self hosted WordPress blog for you.

As you might imagine, I’ve had more than one person throw a fuss over the monthly hosting fee which comes with “Cyber Angel” hosting.   Most are surprised at how QUICKLY I agree to doing it “their” way.  However, for some reason, the ones who ask “Why?” usually end up signing up quickly for the service.  The rest  have gotten exactly what they requested.   I am MORE than willing to set up self hosted WordPress blogs on regular web hosting account, however it comes with the explicit warning that it is the CLIENT’S responsibility to keep the blog installation up to date.

So this morning, I get an email from one of those clients.  At the time of installation, he was all “Scouts honor!  I promise to stay on top of this!”  His last blog post was August 2007.   Unfortunately, while he may have forgotten about his blog, the search engines haven’t.  He wrote a couple of posts which have obviously done VERY well for themselves with the search engines.  Remember, there are always people willing and able to siphon your success!!!  He’s not only not been posting to the blog, he hasn’t stayed on top of the installation issues.

Now he has a problem – a SERIOUS problem.  Seems he’s been getting email messages from unhappy campers as a result of his blog.  They go like this:

To Whom It May Concern:

I am tired of receiving messages containing malicious computer programs (viruses) from your e-mail address!!!

If within 1-2 days you do not stop sending messages to my e-mail address, I will have to address this issue to the Police!…

Today I received a hard copy of your data logs from my Internet service provider. The copy contains your IP address, logs of sending malicious programs and your e-mail address details…
I am sending you the copy of the document containing your data and logs of sending malicious programs as the proof of your fault!!!!!!

You must print the document containing the list of your data and logs of sending malicious programs and pass it on to your Internet service provider with, so that they could find out why the viruses are sent from your computer to my e-mail address!!!!

Ask your Internet service provider to resolve this problem!!!!

Do this now!!!

Once again!!! If you don’t stop sending the letters, I will address to the Police and file a lawsuit against you!!!

I went in and checked and by gum he is running an old version of WordPress.  Go figure.  I quoted him on what it’s going to take to “fix” the problem.

By the way, I can’t imagine that this is helping his company’s “brand” or image in any way, shape or form.  While I’m sure the frustrated sender of the email above will NEVER forget my client’s company (which has been featured in the email address of each and every spam message being sent)  it won’t be a good thing.

If you’re not running WordPress 2.6. X UPGRADE NOW!

Selling Nothing But Air

What are you selling?

Make the mistake of asking a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman that question and he’ll whip out his cleaning machine and be into his sales pitch faster than you can scream, “NO!”  If his sales pitch were a bullet, you’d be dead before you hit the floor.

Ask that same question of a doctor, or an attorney, or any other kind of “service professional” and you would probably be met with a blank stare followed by the response,  “I’m not SELLING anything.  I’m a [fill in the blank].”

Unfortunately, NOTHING and I mean NOTHING is further from the truth. If you’re in business, you’re selling something – PERIOD!

If you’re in business and you can’t pull out  a product to hand to a prospective customer for review, then chances are strong that you’re in the business of selling nothing but air.

  • Your education – nothing but air.
  • Your experience – nothing but air.
  • Your services – nothing but air.

Sometimes referred to as “knowledge professionals”, many of us who live and work on the web are selling nothing but air.  We are joined in the “real” world by dozens of service professionals whose services can not be wrapped and mailed.   The list of those selling nothing but air includes plumbers, dentists, attorneys, doctors, chiropractors, electricians, acupuncturists, realtors, writers, accountants – the list goes on and on.

If this were a paper for a professor in business school,  I’d be using the more “technical” term for selling “nothing but air” and I’d call it the intangible sale.  Then, I’d begin prattling on about the strong connection between MAJOR SALES and INTANGIBLE SALES.   I would point out that while not every Major Sale is an Intangible Sale, every Intangible Sale is by nature a Major Sale.

Thank goodness this isn’t a term paper on Web Marketing 101!

Just as a refresher, there are two types of “sales” your business can make.  There are Minor Sales which are sales that don’t warrant a lot of time or energy on the part of the buyer.   Almost anything offered for sale in a Wal-Mart would qualify as a minor sale.  Even the few items that are sold by Wal-Mart that would meet the criteria for a Major Sale are reduced to Minor Sale status thanks to Wal-Mart’s permissive return policies.

A Major Sale is one where the buyer’s financial and/or emotional investment is significant.  As a result, the purchase warrants significant time and research into alternatives. In the Major Sale, another key factor is that there is the potential for a long-term relationship between you and/or your business and the customer.

In other words, in the Major Sale – the consequences of making a purchasing mistake are high.

  • Choosing the wrong doctor can be a matter of life and death.
  • Choosing the wrong tax professional can mean the difference between business success and business failure.
  • Choosing the wrong divorce attorney can mean the difference between splitting your assets or turning them all over to your soon to be ex-spouse.
  • Choosing the wrong Realtor can mean the difference between buying a house the floods or buying one that is high and dry.

Our town of Port St. Lucie, Florida was making national news after Tropical Storm Fay rolled through.  We got  a lot of rain dumped on our fair city over the course of a few days, exposing to the world a critical flaw in our fair city.  Explosive growth combined with poor planning by city officials = exceptionally poor storm water drainage.  As a result, much of the city was shut down by extensive flooding.

I was getting a manicure last week and he conversation turned to Fay and the extensive flooding that resulted.  I asked my manicurist if she was affected by the flooding.  Her response, “We had a REALLY good realtor who told us when we began looking to buy a house up here about the problems the city has with drainage.  As a result, we purchased our house with the possibility of flooding in mind.  Our house sits high and dry thanks to our realtor’s advice.”

Attention: All Realtors – especially those of you who are “afraid” that the internet is going to replace you-  it won’t if you understand what it is you’re REALLY selling.

Three years later, a manicurist in a popular day spa is still singing the praises of her exceptional realtor – the one who guided them as they made a Major Sale Purchase and kept them from buying a home that was susceptible to flooding.

This is why when you’re in the business of selling nothing but air why it’s so important to build TRUST with prospective clients/customers.  We live in an age which can be defined as a “No Trust Zone“.  Building trust is an essential part of making the sale when you’re selling “nothing but air”.

Realtors – you are selling nothing but air  a.k.a.  – your expertise of your local housing market.

Attorneys – you are selling nothing but air  a.k.a.  – your expertise at negotiation and persuasion.

Doctors – you are selling nothing but air  a.k.a.  – your expertise of the human body.

Accountants, you are selling nothing but air a.k.a. – your expertise and knowledge of the tax code.

Once you recognize the fact that you’re selling nothing but air, it sets the stage for creating physical product you can put in someone’s hands.  Writing a book, an eBook or even a blog is a great way to “bridge” the trust gap and demonstrate your expertise.

Google Chrome – Time for a refreshing dip in the cesspool!

I love blogs. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I love blogs -especially blogs where I can learn from someone else’s mistakes!!!

Today, my love and heartfelt affection goes out to the SEO 2.0 blog. Now I know that downloading the New Google Browser is a Bad Idea.

THANK YOU!

Thank you for diving headfirst into the cesspool that is Chrome!

I feel very, very WISE right now because I’m learning from someone else’s mistake, which appears to be an apt description of the new Google Chrome browser – a mistake.

In 10 Scariest and Most Annoying Facts about Google Chrome I learned that Google Chrome will make changes to my registry file and they’re sketchy about what they’re going to do with the information they obtain from gaining access to my computer.

Because of a blog, I personally can avoid taking a shit bath in the cesspool that is Google Chrome!

Patrick over at Spinning Silk wrote in the post What browser are you using? that he would be tuning in to the Google Chrome announcement.  I’m sure that Patrick didn’t see any of the things the SEO 2.0 blog pointed out during Google’s sales pitch for the new browser.

That’s the beauty of Web 2.0.  Go ahead… make your pitch.  Spin it any way you like.  Once people begin USING the product, the truth WILL come out.

Personally, I’ll stick with Firefox.  It ain’t broken and as such I don’t need to “fix” it by adopting Chrome.

What browser are you using?  Have you tried Chrome?

What is Alexa? It’s a Website Traffic Spy Tool

One of the GREAT things about being involved in a “social networking site” such as Biznik is that people can communicate PRIVATELY with you.

I recently got a question privately there from someone who visited my blog and read my post Business Success Isn’t Determined by Your Alexa Rank. A well respected marketing expert, he wasn’t familiar with the Alexa tool and asked me to blog about it. Since I’m all about educating my clients and other readers, here we go.

What is Alexa?

Alexa is a product developed by Amazon (yes, the internet book selling giant and internet retailing pioneer). It’s a way to “spy” on the traffic of other competing websites.

increasing site trafficAlexa “ranks” websites in order based upon traffic from 1 to 24+Million. (I’ve seen TWO sites in the past 2 weeks that were in the 24 Million range.)

The last time I looked, Yahoo was #1, Google was #2 and YouTube was #4 according to Alexa.

If your Alexa ranking is above 1Million, you can congratulate yourself. You’re in the top 5% when it comes to rating traffic of the 24+ Million sites indexed by Alexa.

With that said, Alexa doesn’t get real interested in your website until your site breaks into the top 100,000. Once you break into the top 100,000, you can see your daily reach, rank and page views.

A Brief History on Alexa

The way Alexa used to collect the information it needed was via a plug in for MSIE (Microsoft Internet Explorer), Window’s internet browsing software. The plug in installed a toolbar in the user’s browser. While it offered a way for users to “spy” on the traffic of other websites, it also provided a way for Alexa to TRACK toolbar users movements on the web.

If you think about it, it makes sense that the only people who really CARE about what kind of traffic other websites are getting tend to be part of the techno-geek crowd. Very few sales training professionals CARE about the web traffic of any particular website. On the other hand, people who create websites are PASSIONATELY interested in the traffic ranking for a site. As a natural progression of events, in the early days the Alexa tool bar was used almost exclusively by web professionals or devoted web amateurs.

increasing site trafficAs the web has grown, so have the number of “non-tech” users. Many of these “non-tech” users didn’t have the Alexa toolbar installed in either MSIE or any other browser. As a result, the results of Alexa’s ranking became rather “skewed” statistically. Sites targeted towards technical users tended to do much better than websites that dealt with non-techy matters such as organic foods.

Meanwhile, new Web 2.0 businesses are popping up left and right. With the explosive growth of blogs has come advertising management services which will allow you to sign up and place ads on your blog via their network. Since ads are sold based on the number of impressions, many of these networks rely heavily upon the Alexa ranking of a website to determine traffic. (Log files can be altered, but Alexa is an unbiased third party.) Also, bloggers are popping up who aren’t blogging about the latest Tech Toy who are developing quite a following. These popular “non-tech” blogs were crying “foul” when it came to Alexa’s method of collecting data.

Recent Changes in Alexa

Back in April, Alexa responded, either to these cries or to the increased competition they were facing. (Compete.com comes quickly to mind.) Alexa changed the way it gathers data for its rankings to try to reflect what was happening in Web 2.0, where it’s not only geeks who roam the web for hours on end. ( Read more here Alexa’s New Ranking System Hurts Some and Helps Some.)

If you go to Alexa, you too can install this tool bar in your web browser. When you do, you’ll be contributing to Alexa’s data collection efforts. In other words, you can spy but you’ll also be spied upon.

blogs as money making marketing toolsThere’s actually a plugin for WordPress which will display your current Alexa ranking in your blog if you want the world to see. (Personally, I’m waiting to break into the top 100,000 to activate that one.)

If you don’t want to install the toolbar, you can always go to the Alexa.com site and type in the URL you want to check.

The most important thing to remember with Alexa is:

a) It’s an estimated traffic count

b) It’s a NUMBER and nothing more.

There are people whose blogs were ranked in the Alexa top 100K who have shut down their blogs and gone on to get real jobs because they weren’t making money from the traffic they had. On the other hand, I recently wrote about a business who is RAKING in the dough whose website is ranked in the 24 Million range.

For me, checking Alexa rankings could be called an addiction. I have a similar addiction to Diet Coke and coffee. (Caffeine FREE Diet Coke… I’m trying to be in “balance” because I drink a pot or two of coffee every morning. Screw moderation, I’m seeking “balance”.)

It’s only recently that I’ve come to recognize NEITHER my drinking habits or my Alexa checking behavior is productive. So before you install the Alexa tool bar in your browser, proceed with caution!