The Alexa rank is measured according to the amount of users who’ve visited a website with the Alexa toolbar installed.

In this post, I’ll examine the importance of the Alexa Rank as it relates to site monetization while briefly discussing some of the weaknesses involved in using Alexa ranking as a reliable traffic measure for any website.

What is the Alexa Rank?
Put simply, the Alexa Rank is a ranking system which bases its ranking schem on the level of traffic each website receives from the number of people who visit a website with the Alexa toolbar installed.

Alexa’s definition of the Alexa Traffic Rank:
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).

Why would you want to increase your Alexa rank?
Webmasters, advertisers and ad networks use your blog’s Alexa rank as a gauge to determine the worth of a link on your website. If you depend on link or site selling as a form of monetization you’ll definitely want to increase your Alexa rank, because it’ll increase your bargaining power when it comes to ad pricing.

ReviewMe, Text Link Ads and Sponsored Reviews are just three of the networks which base your ad selling strength on Alexa Ranks.

Problems with the Alexa Rank
Alexa ranking is heavily skewed towards websites which have a large webmaster/tech audience. This is because webmasters or web savvy audiences are much more likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed than websites whose visitors are unaware of Alexa.

As such, many have indicated that Alexa is a vastly inaccurate method of measuring a website’s reach, traffic and potential. I don’t disagree. Alexa is a silly way to measure web traffic but unfortunately, in an imperfect world Alexa is still heavily used by webmasters and ad networks when measuring the value of advertising on your website.

I understand the defects of Alexa’s ranking system and I’m not going to go into more detail about it here. What’s primarily important to me is that the Alexa Rank has become a central element in site monetization strategies.

I’m not concerned with the utility and value of Alexa but it’s perceived importance in the eyes of potential advertisers.

Alexa is a very powerful tool used to rank web site traffic.

Find out how your web site traffic stacks up against all your competitors! This is one of the most accurate freely available tools to find out how well your site ranks up against millions of other sites on the Web.

Remember: "The lower the Alexa ranking number the more heavily visited the site."

Some examples are:

• amazon.com (rank 14)
• weather.com (rank 64)
• cnn.com (rank 26)
• google.com (rank 5)
• yahoo.com (rank 1)

These rankings are generally consistent with the amount of traffic they have.

Alexa.com is a subsidiary of Amazon.com and is a website which provides information on traffic levels for websites.

Type : Subsidiary Founded 1996
Headquarters : California
Key people : Bruce Gilliat & Brewster Kahle
Industry : Internet information providers
Products : Search Engine
Parent : Amazon.com
Website : Alexa.com
Type of site : Web traffic and ranking
Advertising : Web banner with AdBrite
Available in : English

Alexa Internet was founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat. The company offered a toolbar that gave Internet users guidance on where to go next, based on the traffic patterns of its user community.

Alexa also offered context for each site visited: to whom it was registered, how many pages it had, how many other sites pointed to it, and how frequently it was updated. Engineers at Alexa, in cooperation with the Internet Archive, created the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Alexa also supplies the Internet Archive with web crawls.

In 1999, Alexa was acquired by Amazon.com for about $250 million in Amazon stock. The company's premises are in Building 37 of the Presidio of San Francisco. Alexa began a partnership with Google in spring 2002, and with the Open Directory Project in January 2003. Live Search replaced Google as a provider of search results in May 2006. In September 2006, they began using their own Search Platform to serve results. In December 2006, they released Alexa Image Search. Built in-house, it is the first major application to be built on their Web Platform. Alexa also provides "site info" for the A9.com search engine.

In December 2005, Alexa opened its extensive search index and web-crawling facilities to third party programs through a comprehensive set of web services and APIs. These could be used, for instance, to construct vertical search engines that could run on Alexa's own servers or elsewhere. Uniquely, their Web Search Platform gives developers access to their raw crawl data. In May 2007, Alexa changed their API to require comparisons be limited to 3 sites, reduced size embedded graphs be shown using Flash, and mandatory embedded BritePic ads.

In April 2007, Alexa v. Hornbaker was filed to stop trademark infringement by the statsaholic service. In the lawsuit, Alexa alleges that Hornbaker is stealing traffic graphs for profit, and that the primary purpose of his site is to display graphs that are generated by Alexa's servers. Hornbaker removed the term Alexa from his service name on March 19, 2007.

Alexa ranks sites based on visits from users of its Alexa Toolbar for Internet Explorer and from integrated sidebars in Mozilla and Netscape. In addition to their own statusbar extension, Sparky (released July 2007), there are several third-party extensions for Mozilla Firefox.

Mozilla Firefox Extensions:

• Sparky, Alexa's own statusbar extension
  
• SearchStatus shows Google PageRank and Alexa TrafficRank
  
• About This Site Firefox plug-in that shows metadata from Alexa TrafficRank

There is some controversy over how representative Alexa's user base is of typical Internet behavior. If Alexa's user base is a fair statistical sample of the Internet user population (e.g., a random sample of sufficient size), Alexa's ranking should be quite accurate. In reality, not much is known about the sample and possible sampling biases. Alexa itself notes several examples. A known source of bias is the self-selecting, opt-in nature of Alexa traffic tracking software installation, but the significance of this bias on rankings is not reported.

For getting huge traffic to your website or affiliated program you also need to have a large online friend circle that means you have to socialise online what is more better then the socializing website.

Being or indulging in socialism online is very important.Below are the Top Social Bookmarking Sites where you can submit your blog/website and get a lot of backlinks, increase your traffic and also get indexed by Google.

1. Bloglines
2. Blinklist
3. BlogMarks
4. Co.mments
5. Clipmarks
6. Digg
7. Del.icio.us
8. Dzone
9. Facebook
10. Fark
11. Furl
12. Faves
13. Google Bookmarks
14. HaoHao
15. Kaboodle
16. LinkaGoGo
17. Linkswarm
18. MyBookmarks
19. Mister-Wong
20. Ma.gonlia
21. MyBlogLog
22. Newsvine
23. Netvouz
24. Propeller
25. PlugIM
26. Reditt
27. StumbleUpon
28. Squidoo
29. Slashdot
30. Simpy
31. Spurl
32. Sphere
33. ShoutWire
34. Spotplex
35. Spotback
36. Technorati
37. Taggly
38. Tailrank

One of the most important reasons for failure in affiliate marketing in my list of ‘ 5 reasons for failure in affiliate marketing‘ is not getting enough traffic. Traffic is the life and blood of your affiliate business, in fact, any online business. So why some of the sites are always jammed with traffic and some sites are like abandoned roads with no visitors?

In this post I am going to share the techniques that will help you drive traffic to your sites.

1. When you are unknown, socialize
Social networking sites are now hot places to network with like minded people. In the virtual world of World Wide Web, you meet a lot of people from different corners of the world. This social networking sites has the potential to open a lot of subways to your website and drive traffic to your site. This is one of the most effective and economical ways to get visitors. Some of the networking sites you should definitely consider to promote your sites on are:

• Facebook
• MySpace
• Orkut
• hi5
• Stumbleupon
• Ning

2. The long tail Keyword and search engine traffic
There is a lot of targeted traffic waiting for you to be taken free of cost, if you can learn the technique of long tail keyword. Whenever you write an article, ask yourself 3 questions.

• What kind of audience will be interested in the information you are providing in this article?
• What are the possible phrases they may use to search this information in search engines?
• Where these phrases used in the past on major search engines?

The answers to the above will help you find a list of keywords for that particular post/page. Now make sure you have those phrases sprinkled in the article. Make them bold.

Try to have one of your main keyword in the title of the post. If you do this for every article you write, you will soon see your site rank high in the search results for those keywords. And you will see a surge in your traffic from search engines.

3. Stumbling your way to unlimited traffic
Stumbleupon has proved to be a great traffic sender. It helps you connect with friends and share your posts, meet people that have similar interests, and check out what other people are discovering. The more people stumble your site (vote thumbs up), the more traffic you get. Creating a big network of friends can bring a lot of rewarding traffic that can be beyond your expectations.

Stumbleupon users channel surf the internet with the StumbleUpon toolbar to find great websites, videos, photos and more based on your interests. StumbleUpon recommends the sites based on user interests and display them those sites which have received more reviews and thumbs up. So the more positive stumbles your web pages receive, the more it will be recommended to StumbleUpon users.

4. Share your views with others in your niche
Search for forums and blogs which are in your niche. Make a list of those sites and keep visiting them regularly. Reply to queries of other members and share your views. Networking with others in your niche will help you gain traffic from those sites and you will also become a known person in your target niche. Make sure the content you post on others blog or forums is worth to read. Also don’t spam. Spamming can have a negative effect and make you less credible.

• If you have written some great articles, email other bloggers in your niche and chances are they will link to it.
• Make sure you have your site url linked to your main keyword in the signature of forum posts.
• Write comments on other blogs
• Write guest posts for other blogs in your niches

5. Write articles in article directories
Article directories are one of the best ways to get back links. Write quality articles and submit them to article directories. The more articles you write the more chances of your articles to be grabbed by other webmasters.

Article directories provide a Bio/Resource box where you can put an active link to your website. Many site owners visit these article directories and publish articles with your credits and links. This will not only help you getting direct referral traffic from these sites but also help you getting higher rank in search engines. The list of major article directories can be found below:

• www.goarticles.com
• www.ezinearticles.com
• www.isnare.com
• www.amazines.com
• www.articlecube.com
• www.articlebiz.com
• www.articlealley.com
• www.articlesfactory.com

6. Serve your audience like they are the king
While I will always argue that quality content is essential in drawing readers to your site I am increasingly convinced that one way to build your readership is to create spaces that people will want to belong to. Build an interactive place, where your readers could participate. Treat them with utmost importance. Give them recognition, post their comments, create spaces for them on your site. Spaces that your readers will promote for you. Let your readers take the lead. They will grow your site and will promote for you.

These readers will become your loyal fans and they are the one who will make your site grow beyond your imagination. They will visit your blog again and again and will advocate your blog to other readers. The more of these fans increases, the more your site grows in value. Remember, the online property you own appreciates in value if you have a loyal readership which is increasing day by day.

One of the most important reasons for failure in affiliate marketing is not having proper tools. Proper tools will make your journey in affiliate marketing easy and fruitful. A combination of proper tools and techniques will make your affiliate business very rewarding.

In this post of the five part series of how to overcome failures in affiliate marketing, I am revealing all the tools that will accelerate the process of making money using affiliate marketing.

The lists of tools and resources that will aid you in your affiliate business venture are listed below. Some of these tools are free and some require you to buy them.

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EMAIL AUTO RESPONDERS
Aweber Auto responder :
Unlimited auto responders follow up messages, and campaigns are at the heart of the AWeber system. With 99.34% email deliver ability, this is a must have tool for any affiliate marketer.

Get Response Autorseponder :
Get Response is easy, web-based email marketing software that delivers your campaigns, offers, newsletters, follow-ups and auto responder messages. This is the second most used auto responder after aweber.

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ARTICLE MARKETING
EzineArticles.com :
The number one Article Directory. Submit your articles for distribution in front of our content-hungry audience. Also find articles to publish on your Blogs and web-sites.

GoArticles.com :
GoArticles.com is one of more than 15 web sites comprising the Jayde Online Network. It is a well established article directory with a nice page rank. Get a lot of exposure by submitting articles to this directory.

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SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO) TOOLS
Web CEO :
Web CEO is one of the most complete SEO software. There is a free version available. The free version offers many features, which you don’t find even in some paid SEO software.

SEO Elite :
SEO Elite is one of the best products by Brad Callen. It’s written for the absolute beginner, but covers things that only the most advanced search engine optimizers know. SEO Elite is one such software which I recommend very much.

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MARKETING & KEYWORD RESEARCH TOOLS
Word tracker :
Word tracker helps website owners and search engine marketers identify keywords and phrases that are relevant to their business and most likely to be used as queries by search engine visitors. Marketers can also determine how many competing sites are using those keywords and can identify the phrases that have the greatest traffic potential.

Keyword Elite :
Keyword elite is again one of the most powerful products from Brad Callen. And it justifies the statement on his site ‘The most powerful keyword research software on the planet!’ A must have tool, if you are serious about making money online.

Keyword Discovery :
Keyword Discovery compiles keyword search statistics from over 180 search engines world wide, to create the most powerful Keyword Research tool. KeywordDiscovery can tell you the search phrases people use to find products and services, as well as the search terms that drive traffic to your competitors.

Keyword Suggestion Tool :
This is a handy little tool that will show you the phrases that are searched more often from both Word tracker and Overture. This tool is Free.

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TRAFFIC ANALYZERS
Google Analytic :
The new Google Analytic makes it easy to improve your results online. Write better ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives, and create higher-converting websites. Google Analytics is free to all advertisers, publishers, and site owners. It’s one of the best traffic analytics software on the web.

CrazyEgg :
Create tests to figure out what people are doing on your website. This tool tracks where readers of your site click when surfing. It creates a heatmap of the results.

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BLOG SOFTWARE
Wordpress:
Wordpress is the undisputed the best blogging software. The best part of the tool is that it’s absolutely free. The tool is comprehensive software which you can use for your blog or CMS. With thousands of themes and plug ins, you can customize the software as you want.

Blogger:
Blogger is also one of the powerful blogging platform which is hosted freely. The tool is also easy to use and widget ready. You can make your site live in minutes with this tool and that too absolutely Free!

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These are some of the tools that will help you accelerate your journey to make money online. Do share the tools you are using in comments!

I have discussed the different business models to make money as an affiliate in my first post of the five post series. In this post I am revealing the strategies that you can apply to those business models.

A strategy is a plan of action created to achieve goal. And your goal is to make money. In this post I will reveal some winning strategies that will help you make money as an Affiliate.

Choose your Advertisers carefully:
Every online advertiser wants affiliates to promote their product. So choose your advertisers carefully.

* Before you start promoting any product, make sure you read the Advertisers terms and conditions.
* Many companies set a minimum payout level. Make sure the minimum payout level is not too high. Many companies try to fool affiliates by setting the payout very high, knowing that most of the affiliates will not reach there and hence they don’t need to pay for the hard work of affiliates.
* Many merchants use cookies to track your referrals. As most people don’t purchase on the first visit to a site, a cookie allows tracking your referral, even if he purchases after some days, you will be still credited for the lead or sale as long as the cookie is live. So the longer the cookie life, the more chances of getting paid for the sales.
* Make sure the affiliate links are setting cookies properly. A software malfunction or a buggy affiliate tracking software can rob you of commissions you deserve for the sales. So test your links whether they are setting cookies or not, before you start promoting the program.

Communicate With Your Advertisers:

* Communication with Merchants is very important when you are promoting their products. Contact the merchant, let them know how you are promoting their product and ask their advice for improvements. Merchants Affiliate Mangers will be eager to help you. After all you are bringing sales for that merchant. They may also share techniques used by other successful affiliates, which can give a real boost to your earnings.
* Communication with your Advertiser will also help you understand his genuineness. If your advertiser is not responding to serious issues, think again about promoting their products. Remember some Advertisers may have a lot of emails to answers, so at least give them some time. If you don’t get reply within 3 days, shoot one more email. Wait for another 3 days and if the Advertiser doesn’t reply, then should reconsider promoting them.
* If you are bringing good number of sales or leads for the merchant, negotiate for higher commissions. Sometimes, a merchant may not offer higher commissions, but he may provide you with some special coupons, to be given to your end users that will get your conversions even higher.

Do not depend upon one advertiser or one product:

* Diversification is one of the most important strategies in Affiliate Marketing. Don’t depend upon one advertiser or a product. If that program dies, your income source dies too. Choose different products and different Advertisers and build your affiliate business around them.

Know your Audience:

* It is very important to know who your visitors are. Where there are coming from? Knowing your visitors demographics is very important because the offers you target to them will be relevant to them. I have seen affiliates promoting products which are available only to the west to the audience from the East.
* Learn the patterns your visitors are following on your website. There are lots of tools available in the market to track visitors’ patterns on your web pages. Study those patterns and build sites that are audience friendly. I will list the tools that make an affiliate successful, in the next post of this series.

Don’t Miss the seasonal Trends:

* Every Season has some special products which can make your cash box ringing. Do some research on the buying patterns of consumers and find out the products which are hot in season. Promoting hot products lead to more conversions.
* Don’t forget the holiday season. It is one of the best seasons for both merchants and affiliates. Prepare for the holiday season in advance. Be up to date with Advertiser offers and inform your visitors as fast as you can. I will give you the tools to inform your visitors as soon as you get some exciting offers in my next post of the series.

These are some of the strategies which helps you build a affiliate marketing business model which is solid and reliable. In my next post, I will give you all the tools that will get your affiliate commissions rolling!

Affiliate Marketing is such a great business venture which can make you thousands and thousands of dollars every month without the hassles of a traditional business. You don’t need to worry about managing inventories, processing payments, shipping, customer support etc. AND even then many affiliates FAIL to reach a mere $250 per month target and there are many who haven’t yet received their first check.

So why are most affiliates failing to make a decent earnings from affiliate marketing?

The five reasons why affiliates fail to earn decent commissions are:

1. Not Having a Proper Business Model
2. Not Having Proper Strategies
3. Not Having Proper Tools
4. Not Having Professionalism in doing business
5. Not Having Enough Traffic

In series of five Posts, I will give you the information to overcome the above reasons and succeed in Affiliate Marketing, starting with Affiliate Business Models below.

Affiliate Marketing Business Models:

Affiliate marketing industry is one of the fastest growing industries. The reason being, it’s easy to start. And since it’s easy to start, many people take it easily. And thus they fail easily. If you are serious about your affiliate marketing business, then you need to have one or many of the below listed business models. These Business models have proved to be successful and are making money for many affiliates:

Below are the proven business models for successfully making money in Affiliate Marketing:

1. Product Comparison Site:
Product comparison site is a proven business model. Consumers are searching for products and they want to compare them. They want the information about similar products before they make their buying decision. And if you can provide this comparison, you make lots of commission.

2. Shopping Comparison Site:
It’s slightly different then product comparison site. People who want to buy a product are looking for shops that are offering the best price. So with the shopping feeds provided by major networks, you can set up your comparison site and give your visitors, prices of a product from different shops. This is again one of the most successful business models and could make lots of money.

3. Product Review Site:
This is one of the easiest business models to do affiliate marketing. And since easy, thousands and thousands of review sites has emerged in almost all niches. For a review site to be successful, you need to build trust with your visitors. I always recommend my visitors to leave their own review. I follow up them with their buying experience and I put their reviews on my site. Honesty is the best policy on a product review site. And the more honest you are with your review, the more it shows in it. And this build a trusting relationship with your visitors, that will bring you many more commission checks in the future.

4. Coupon or Promo codes Model:
A coupon sites collects and build a database of all the available coupons from advertisers. These coupons are logically stored in database. Visitors can search for coupons for a product or for a particular shop. As the person searching for a coupon is in a ready-to-buy mindset, the conversions are very high. You need to be up to date with your site by adding new coupons, removing expired coupon etc. This business model is also very rewarding.

5. Paid Search (PPC):
PPC (Pay per click) as the name says, you pay for your ads only when some body clicks on them. On major PPC networks like Google Adwords and Yahoo Overture, you bid for the keyword. And if your bid is higher, your ads are displayed on top and are displayed more often. There are also various techniques to optimize your ads for them to get better ranking. If a click converts to a sale or lead, you earn commission, and hopefully profits from the difference in keyword cost versus earned commission. This is also known as ‘arbitrage’.

All the above business models above have proven to be successful. You can use one or more of the above business models. I recommend mastering one business model at a time and moving to another.

I will give you the best strategies that are proven to be successful in my next post!

Before going any further let’s discuss the basic five pillars or any affiliate marketing or we may say basic points about affiliate marketing, I will also be posting my views on all the points in my next post.

1.Affiliate Marketing Business Models.

2.Different strategy of making money in affiliate marketing.

3.Affiliate Marketing basic Tools

4.Being Professional in Affiliate Marketing

5.Web Traffic - The life & blood of online business

And of course we cannot leave this out .

How to overcome the 5 reasons for failure in Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts.

Affiliate marketing is also the name of the industry where a number of different types of companies and individuals are performing this form of Internet marketing, including affiliate networks, affiliate management companies, and in-house affiliate managers, specialized third party vendors, and various types of affiliates/publishers who promote the products and services of their partners.

Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.

Affiliate marketing—using one website to drive traffic to another—is a form of online marketing, which is frequently overlooked by advertisers. While search engines, e-mail, and website syndication capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing carries a much lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to play a significant role in e-retailers' marketing strategies.