Top 3 Common Problems Bloggers Tend To Focus On, Are You One of Them?
I have been blogging a while now, and I even been training off line but what I noticed very often many people would focus on the wrong things on their blog. If you are serious about making money from blogging then you would want to read every single word, I about to say to assist you to build a profitable blog.
The tips I share here are really truth regardless if your blog is new or popular it will give you some head start what you can do to make more money on your blog in this new year.
1. Do Not Focus Too Much On Alexa Ranking
To be really frank, Alexa ranking is nothing more than just a number to me which makes no much sense to me. Because the voting of Alexa really varies in different types of blogs you are creating. Most time if you are writing a tech or Internet marketing related blog you would most often get high Alexa ranking because most of your readers are also using the Alexa toolbar.
Here’s a definition from Alexa Website how do they give you the rankings.
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.
So as you can see, the number you see in Alexa is not really 100% accurate, but it’s only a good selling point to advertisers =)
2. Do Not Focus Too Much On Page Rank
I still can remember when I first started my blog during the first month when I got page rank 2, it was the happiest thing in my career of blogging. However, what later I learn is that having great page rank has nothing to do with your income on your blog. Even thought my blog now has page rank zero for what ever reasons I am not sure but the strange thing is that I still get lots of traffic from search engines which is key to blogging.
Here’s a definition of Google Page Rank from Wikipedia
In other words, a PageRank results from a “ballot” among all the other pages on the World Wide Web about how important a page is. A hyperlink to a page counts as a vote of support. The PageRank of a page is defined recursively and depends on the number and PageRank metric of all pages that link to it (”incoming links”). A page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself. If there are no links to a web page there is no support for that page.
Google assigns a numeric weighting from 0-10 for each webpage on the Internet; this PageRank denotes a site’s importance in the eyes of Google. The scale for PageRank is logarithmic like the Richter Scale and roughly based upon quantity of inbound links as well as importance of the page providing the link. blockquote>
The strange thing about this theory is that my blog has lots of hyperlink votes (total of 6,120 in fact ) but I still get page rank zero = P
3. Do Not Focus Too Much On Technorati Ranking
If you are into blogging you would know what Technorati is as they have indexed today over 150 million blogs up to date which is a lot! So what is this Technorati Ranking? Here’s definition of it from Technorati
A Technorati Ranking relates to the number of sources that point to a particular weblog relative to other weblogs. The more sources referencing a weblog, the higher the Technorati ranking. The Technorati Ranking for a blog is displaying in URL Search results, Blog search results, and is dipslayed in the account profile for all claimed blogs.
My ranking now is about 8,500 out of 150 million blog online which is a good number but how does that relate to you in terms of dollars? Franking speaking nothing. What it really helps most of the time is to boost your advertising marketing as advertisers most of the time would only advertise on sites that have all these nice rankings.
So Alvin Where Is The Real Money From?
Some bloggers may not agree with me on the point, but I would say, opt-in are key to blogging not the RSS feed! What are your thoughts about this? Leave your comments below.
I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you.
Matt Hanson
Alvin ,
The infamous “Money Is In The List” still holds !
Health Blog
Hi Alvin,
I agree with you. Most people who subscribe to rss feed, may not even read it. How I know that, because I am one of them.
Building a list is surely the most important task because you can drive traffic on demand. Haha
John
Marketing Product Review
Good advice, Alvin.
My thoughts on why people tend to focus on the parameters that you mentioned ( rankings,PR) is because such mechanisms give the blogger feedback on his or her progress.
It can be very satisfying to see the Alexa ranking reduced ‘drastically’ after some time.
Otherwise it is like Michael Jordan taking shots and not knowing the score.
And because the rankings can be seen everytime the blogger opens his blog, the convenience make it attractive to continue to see or focus on the numbers.
Perhaps I’d like to suggest an alternative.
These alternatives provide more meaningful feedback mechanism and it is fairly convenient too.Readers need to click one icon only.
What I am referring is to use ’sitemeter’ or ‘cluster map’.
To appreciate the benefit, do take a look at the examples on the following blog:
Sitemeter at
Cluster map at
Opt-in method to making money is awesome.
The only challenge is that for newbies, they need some guidance on installation of opt-in and the techniques of writing the series of emails in the autoresponder.
Knowing you, you will explore this further to share with your readers, right?
Cheers,
philip
I have thoroughly enjoyed your ebooks and tutoring. You are a passionate guy about blogging and it shows. I know your purpose is to make money, just like the rest of us, but you bring it down to the basic level and explain things that even newbies can understand.
Thank you, Alvin. You are appreciated at Power-Teams.Com
Joanna
Hi Alvin
Some interesting points in this post and ones that go against some popular held views from what I have observed.
What I do agree with is that from my own experience having some form of opt-in system is paramount and is more widely used than rss feeds.
Thanks for your continued output of posts, they are always thought provoking.
Kind Regards
Chris
Thank you Alvin,
I am new to Web 2.0 Blogging and have jumped in with two feet and all available time on my hands with the understanding from my wife, Wednesday night is date night, lol…
So far I have learned from my four weeks:
1)When I post good quality content or review another article with links back to their blog, I get traffic.
2)I find a forum and place comments, then link an article on the forum to the posting on our blog, traffic picks up.
3) Put a few articles on squidoo.com and one article is on the front page of travel. I will place the link here if you can give me advice on what I can do different to make it better. You can edit my article and remove the link once you see my style of writting, thank you.
4)I link from the blog to my wife’s online hosiery store and orders have doubled within four weeks, this is an Awesome powerful way of marketing and I look forward to seeing what a total of six months will bring.
Thank you for sharing your knowledge with those of us that want to learn and I am starting to build a list with aweber.
That’s nice to hear.. keep up the good work Robert =)
Well, page rank or alexa rank as some one points do provide feed back on how a blog is going, we all love to know what is our standing in our niche but the point is, people tends to focus too much on that and just left other details that they can do, and as alvin pointed the list,
you can have high site rank but no list then meaning you can make money from advertising but what if you keep a list along the way?
when your site got first page of google say, then you send emails to you subscriber and ask if they would like to advertise then I think it will safe you and effort to start from the beginning.
you list is the best resource, if you treat them well, they will listen, and the end results, take up your offer and you’ll have money
I think there is a glaring spelling mistake or the used of WRONG word. Shouldn’t it be “TEND” and not “TENT”?
haha.. thanks for pointing that out… I forgot to spell check that =)
My success with these two?, my list does better, than the RSS feed for my blog, on this one site. Though I must say that RSS is a powerful addition to a blog, and shouldnt be left out. Some times (rarely-mots of the product releases are junk HYPE and I dont do hype) I do a product review and I know that the RSS readers are receiving this, as well. And many sales are being made that way as well. But the better direct response has been through my list. I havent yet figured out how to monetize the RSS feed effectively.
Anyone have any Ideas about that.
The biggest mistake I see and is a question I get from time to time (how do I know what keywords people use to find blah blah blah) is bloggers focusing FIRST on keyword research, and not on focusing on a niche that sells. Fisrt find a niche with hungry and or desperate buyers, then figure out how people find the products that suit what ever their needs are.
I just find people are doing it backwards.
Ive always gone for niches that sell, before I do any keyword research.