Blogging

People paying for blog posts uses Alexa as a ranking score

I have recently joined MyBlogLog as you can see from the neat little widget on my side bar to the right. Upon joining, I have discovered many bloggers which are making money via Adsense, CPM ads and the most popular method was via PayPerPost. Though I have never experienced this myself, as I generate most of my blogging income via CPM, Adsense and Intext ads, it seems that your blog will need to have a high alexa ranking in order to increase your PayPerPost earnings.

Alexa estimates a website’s traffic via a limited sample space of users who have the Alexa toolbar installed. This skews the results to show only technical users or slightly more web savvy users as average users would not have heard or been in contact with Alexa or their toolbar.

You can probaby tell that this would not be the best method to measure a website’s web traffic, however, Alexa is one of the only websites which can provide any type of traffic reporting to the public for free. That being said, there are alternatives to using Alexa such as Hitwise and Spyfu.

Hitwise is one of the world’s largest traffic measurement and competitive analyst companies whom calculates web traffic via using DNS information. I am not 100% sure of how it works exactly, however the sample data is a lot more complete when compared with Alexa’s traffic ranking methods. Unfortunately though, the price tag on accessing Hitwise’s analytic information is not reachable for an average joe.

Spyfu, on the other hand, is a similar product to Hitwise with a much smaller price tag and virtually no entrance barrier. Though I must say that the information provided by Spyfu can sometimes be misleading if not blantantly wrong. They also concentrate mainly on websites in America, hence does not serve its purpose very well in other countries.

So before you pay for a blog post, don’t just look at their Alexa ranking, research a bit via different traffic analysing programs to make sure that you get what you are paying for.  You will also need to check how fresh his blog is as well as their page rank and Google index penetration (in terms of back links and number of pages indexed) as these will give you a good indication of whether they get organic traffic from search engines (Google in particular).

Founder of UnicornGO, Visugu and Pixelsquare. I am an Aussie with a passion for building sustainable and scalable businesses servicing the mid to enterprise tier clients. Have an idea that need funding? Reach out to me and we can have a chat.

3 Comments

  • Meg

    Hi Francis

    My understanding is that Hitwise get data from participating ISPs. In Australia the leading ISP doesn’t supply their data to Hitwise (well they didn’t a few months back when I asked about it), so in one fell swoop you eliminate up to a third of the market. For what it’s worth…

  • Francis Lee

    I knew it was one of the other, obtaining traffic data is one of the biggest pain in the rear end for some many web masters. Proving your traffic is also a very difficult task as potential website hunters or payperpost customers take our word with a grain of salt.

    However, if we consolidate all the different methods of obtaining traffic data, we may get a better view of where a website (or blog site in this case) stands.

    So far I believe your way of measuring traffic is good, combining the Austrailan and global alexa ranking as well as taking into consideration Technorati’s view on a blog. Gives potential payperpost alot more info before deciding to actually pay for a post.

  • Greg

    PayPerPost use various criteria that can best be described as segmentation where advertisers can choose to specify certain criteria for their advertising opportunities that can include criteria like page rank, alexa, technorati, category as well as the standard location criteria. Use of Alexa is more pronounced on other advertiser sites, especially texst link ads and their offspring review me.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *