2007.02.26

Improving your Alexa Ranking & Earn More with Text Link Ads

Posted in Blogging for Profit, Traffic Generation at 1:20 am by admin

I have a link to check my Alexa ranking in my Firefox toolbar, and do so almost every day; Usually just after I check my internal server logs just to see how closely Alexa matches these statistics. Although some will dispute the validity of Alexa ratings, major advertising networks such as AdBrite and Text Link Ads use Alexa ratings regularly to price advertising on publisher websites — this means that you should care about your Alexa rating, and check it regularly!

Alexa ranks are determined in a similar manner to how Neilson TV ratings are generated — the browsing habits of a small portion of the population are monitored through a client-side installed browser toolbar and then multiplied by the estimated total Internet user population to determine total traffic to a particular website. Recently, Alexa updated the way which it displays the “Reach” statistic. Previously, this measure was a quite confusing number to understand; Now, it is given as a percentage of all Internet users. I find it quite interesting to know what percentage of Internet users visit my website — even the smallest percentage multiplied by 1,093,529,692 (World Internet Statistics) is quite a large volume of traffic. To put things in perspective, Alexa currently ranks Google as receiving 24.2% of global Internet traffic, whereas CyberWyre received a peak of approximately 0.05% of Internet traffic in June 2006 (which was so much traffic at the time that my server had connection issues)

How to Improve your Alexa Rank

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2007.02.04

It’s Tax Time.. Again!

Posted in Blogging for Profit at 5:17 pm by admin

That time of year has come again, and as much as you don’t want to, if you made over $600 from AdSense in 2006, you need to report your income to the IRS. Unfortunately, Google AdSense income is taxable income. Remember, Google takes income from clients who pay money for their ads to be run through AdSense. In order to reduce their overall income (and thus reduce their taxes) they will declare payouts to you as an expense. To Google, you are an independent contractor, being paid via 1099-MISC and this relationship will be reported to the IRS.

For more information on how Google will report your income, and how you should declare it, refer to my previous Google Adsense Tax article, posted last year.