Wish I were a Super Postie

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I don't know how you other posties do it! There you are with five, six, ten blogs; posting your heart away. Of course, it shows with a few of you making a couple of thousands from PPP. So I am in absolute awe of your effort! Where do you find the time? How do you schedule your day? Yes, I have a couple of other jobs and my travel time takes up almost three hours a day. But I don't have a family to tend to when I get home or a house to clean. Well, I do have a house to clean and dishes and laundry to do. But someone said to live each day as your last. And who wants to do house work on their last day?! Nah, I do it ... as time allows.

Anyway, I didn't want to neglect our Alexa project and it has bothered me since day one that I couldn't make visits to everyone's site on the list every single day. SO! I've finally written a script that I can run daily to visit every link on Robyn's Alexa Project page (see the link on my sidebar). In fact, I am adding my friends' sites to my script as well. If you have blogcatalog (or the like) on your site, you should see my smiling face or my 'Animal' pic when I visit. If you are reading this and you want me to stop by your site to help your Alexa rating, then email me or leave a comment. I'm porting this script to my other two computers, so ideally your blog will have three daily visits from me. O'tay? Now I just need to find time to develop my half-baked posts into tasty pieces, quick fried to the crackly crunch, juicy yet firm blogs ....

Embracing Alexa

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Because I spent so much time in the fighting spyware and virus, my immediate reaction to PPP's use of Alexa was tremendously negative. And rightly so. Back in the late 80s and early 90s, Alexa promoted itself as a Internet Explorer addon in the form of a search engine toolbar. What people didn't know what that it was tracking and reporting their every movement about the Internet. Hence it earned the label "spyware". A few years ago, Alexa finally changed and openly let people know its true function, thus stepping outside the definition of spyware. Now you knowingly give up your privacy when you install Alexa onto your browser. Surprisingly many people have done so, enough that Amazon bought Alexa because of it's tracking potential. Imagine having a store in the mall and being able to track every visitor's stop and purchase in that mall - which store, what item, how much.

So then, the rating score simply relates to how many browsers have visited a given site with the Alexa toolbar installed. Nothing to do with representing all the Internet traffic. Fair enough. The Alexa website even carries the disclaim that they are NOT an accurate representation of Internet traffic. Good. With that understand, I can now accept that there is nothing fraudulent about Alexa itself. But what about it usage?

Since I've installed it in my browser, my score has improved (to 806,667 as of today). My surfing habits have NOT changed except to include visits to sites of several new friends. In fact, several of us have 'gone to the dark side' and added Alexa to our browsers. Because of this, there are now posts on PPP forums and blogs accusing us of fraudulent activity - by 'gaming' of the system. Yet, all we have done is make sure Alexa counts our sites now. The first time I pass through the Alexa turnstile for day, I get one count. No matter, how many times I return, it's remains one count. So I can't force the number higher by myself. Nothing fraudulent here.

The ball falls on PayPerPost then. Are they assuming that their advertisers fully understand the nature of Alexa score? Are they simply toting the fact that an advertiser has 'choices' in the way a salesman would go on about features he doesn't understand or want to explain? Or has PPP put an explanation to go with Alexa and other options available to advertisers? How can any advertiser fully utilize PayPerPost if they don't have a complete understand of what PPP offers? Time will tell, I guess.

Two Milestones

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Last night, my Alexa dropped by 81,293 to 881,420. Of course, three points do not a trend make ... unless you're in politics. Still, a forth reading will help determine a general direction and perhaps a little predictability. At this point, I hope PPP changes nothing about Alexa. The standards have changed enough to make this pay-for-blogging more frustrating than it should be. Now I need all the help that I can get.

Last night, I also set up an account with bluehost.com to create my own domains. Now that learning curve starts and a three month deadline looms to get my blogs in place. I'll release links to my site(s) when they have a little substance to them, ok?

Ok, I can't resist! Here is an extremely rough forecast for this coming week's score. The green is the more conservative forecast, while the blue line is the closest matching to current scores:

Hurray, Another Drop In My Score

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Sometime between 5:30 this evening and 7:30, my Alexa score dropped to 962,713 from 1,001,770 - a drop of 39,057 this time. Does this mean that there is a four day pause between score updates? Hopefully PPP will reflect this change on their site tomorrow. The gaming experiment continues ...

What Happened to my Alexa Score?

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After I had made the changes to my browser, I was excited to see an immediate improvement to my Alexa score. That was Wednesday night. Now it's Saturday, my rating has not changed at all from Wednesday's exhilarating result. Was Wednesday night's improvement a fluke? Does the score update nightly or is it something that refreshes weekly or even monthly? For now, I can only wait and see if my ranking changes next Wednesday.

My Alexa Score Improved Within 24 hours!

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On Wednesday night, my Alexa score was 1,025,188. Last night, some time between 9pm and 11pm, it decreased to 1,001,770. All I did refresh my page every so often on three different computers. This is very encouraging! Now if only PPP would update their records according. Thanks to their snafu, I haven't been able to blog for them. This morning, I found that I had been bumped out of the top ten list by a Malaysian woman who has about 50 million blogs. No problem for her to post! In any case, let's see how good I can make my score.

Alexa Experiment

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Ok, I can rant and show that the Alexa rating is just a step above reading a horoscope. But it is believed in enough to be a factor to some online businesses. So let's see if I can 'game' my score, that is, improve it through my direct efforts. At the moment, Alexa rates this blog at 1,025,188. In other words, Alexa thinks there are over a million blogs with better traffic. Possibly. I track the number of visitors and repeat visits. Compared to my other blog, this one has more traffic. Yet, my other site, "Life Under Construction", has a rating of 70.

So to improve this blog's rating, I have done the following:
1) added an Alexa widget to this page,
2) added a search extension to my Firefox browser, at home and at work. As I visit my page once a day, Alexa will register my hit.

Let the *gaming* begin!