Alexa.com defines themselves as “the web information company,” but to webmasters and bloggers, they are so much more. Essentially, Alexa is a company that measures web traffic on almost every website on the internet through their increasingly popular toolbar plugin. This becomes an important element in leveraging your blog’s ranking as a sell point to advertisers, sponsors, buyers, readers and whoever else wants a piece of your material.

Why is this important? Alexa rankings can make or break your business.

Before you freak out, let me explain how this plays out. Essentially, the way Alexa.com is measuring your website’s traffic is one of the most unfair surveys around. Why? Well they only record hits on your blog if it passes through their systems… meaning that your visitors need either the Alexa.com toolbar installed or you need to have a widget displayed on your website.

Advantage internet/technology bloggers. As a whole, the tech readership crew is much more likely to have an Alexa toolbar installed than your typical user. What this means for non-tech focused websites is that they are going to be seen as having less traffic than others.

So I have less traffic according to some company… who cares!?
You need to start caring about your Alexa.com ranking if you aren’t already. As much as it pains me to say this, they have a monopoly over the sector. As advertisers move away from the unreliable “Google Pagerank” service, Alexa Ranking is the next logical sell point to move towards (and eventually destroy ).

Your Alexa ranking is used as a big factor in valuing the advertising space on your website by, I would say, about 85% of advertisers. A higher positioning means more money in your pocket. Alexa rankings are being used increasingly to leverage blogs, despite the fact that the numbers can be horrendously manipulated. More high paying reviews, better advertising offers, more press coverage, it is a must have.

What can you do to improve your ranking?
So you have a less-than-stellar rating, don’t worry… you can improve and manipulate this pretty easily. Here are the top three things you should be doing, anything else is water under the bridge… so when you read a post “the top x ways to improve your Alexa ranking,” they are making most of it up out of thin air.

1. Place an Alexa.com widget/plugin or chart on your website
2. Install the Alexa toolbar on your own computer and encourage your readers to do the same on their computers
3. Write popular content and get SEO optimized for traffic

Pretty self-explanatory, throw an Alexa widget up on your website. Why? This logs your visitors even if they don’t have a toolbar. Essentially, this can make up for visitors not having toolbars of their own (though not entirely). I have heard reports of HUGE gains after installing an Alexa chart or widget. They offer them to you on the website for free, so you should be taking advantage of their offer.

Other than that, you need to have the traffic to push your ranking up, so keep writing interesting content that is dense with information so you get the search engine positioning and page views that you need. Your ranking is based on your last three months of traffic average traffic, so while my weekly average is currently under 100,000, I am registering a 273,000 Alexa ranking. This will take some time, so be patient and keep writing.

Alexa.com ranking is important, so you definitely shouldn’t underestimate its influence on your earnings. Don’t get freaked out if your rating isn’t so hot, because there is more to life on the web than statistics alone. But if you simply don’t care, you need to start caring because you are missing out on potential income by having a poor rank.

-The Net Fool

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This week, I want to have a look at a somewhat new website called Retire At 21. While this is a paid review, I have been friends with the owner (Michael) for a few weeks now, and can definitely attest to his overall knowledge of the business world. The key message? Despite how old you are, you can use the web to retire early if you play your cards right.

As the internet grows, there has been an increasingly large amount of what we call young entrepreneurs. Myself included, lots of people are finding ways to make a living off the internet. While I fully intend on working most of my life, and actually want it that way, the fact remains that most of us are looking for an early retirement, Retire at 21 give you the tools to make this dream a reality, for free.

Looking at the website, the first thing you might notice is that all of the information is free. Being so used to having to shell out monthly subscription money to view great content like this, it is definitely a great sight to see.

Perhaps the most interesting lure of this website is the fact that Michael has stored up massive amounts of quality interviews with some of the most well known internet moguls around. People like Aaron Wall (SEO Book), Paul Bourque (Azoogle Ads), Pete Cashmore (Mashable) and Graham Langdon (Entrecard) all make an appearance among many other top names. This is some thing that I love about the website. Who better to learn the tricks of the trade from then the people who have done it right, and gotten rich!

Retire At 21 not only has the information you need to get you thinking, but they have all of the tools and tutorials at your disposal. What am I talking about? Some great articles like their extensive “Creating a Website” resource as well as a full listing of monetization tools and different methods of making money online. If someone has dreamed up a way to profit of the net, you are sure to find it fully described here. What I am trying to say, is that RetireAt21.com can be a one-stop source for your researching and planning.

Being an active members of the forum board as well, I have come to find that a lot of the advice you can get on this community comes from people successfully doing what you are attempting. They have managed to increase their membership dramatically in such a short period of time, and there are plenty of users available to help you make money. The forums are not only a great way to network with “better” bloggers, but a solid means of researching what it takes to be successful online.

Another thing that I like about this website is their dedication to growth. Michael nagged me several times about publishing this post, which really goes to show how determined he is to maximize his readership at all costs. Proving my point is their subscriber count and traffic reports, which have been growing at consistently phenomenal rates since January. I would venture a bet that it won’t be long before this website is on top of the market, so get in now while everything is still free!

My criticism of this website mainly goes around the fact that it sometimes seems to be too flashy for my tastes. What do I mean by this? I am all for young entrepreneurs, but sometimes this website gives off an all too arrogant “know-it-all” charm that gets to me. Understandably, the publishers at Retire At 21 have spent most of their attention in internet marketing… but I’d much rather be talked to on the same level than talked down to. Regardless, they really know their stuff.

If you are a young entrepreneur and you want some tips on being the best of the best, you should definitely swing by Retireat21.com. The information contained on this dense website is very valuable, and I was honestly a bit surprised that there are no subscriptions necessary. This one definitely has a bright future in front of it.

-The Net Fool

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“Your blog, thenetfool.com, is worth $64,357.56.” After taking a look at several of the so-called “best” website value calculators online, I have come to realize just how awful these ranking metrics really are! Many people attempt to use these estimating services to justify higher appraisals for their websites and blogs, and I admit that some services are more accurate than others. But hey, if you can find someone to buy theNetFool.com off me for $65,000… let me know!

I mean to tell you, there is no service that works. I have gotten “appropriate” values ranging from $78 to $65,000… and I’m starting to feel that there is just no way to put a price tag on a website with a computer-generated system. By using rating metrics such as Technorati, Google Pagerank, Alexa and even Yahoo backlinks, these website value calculators are a hoax. Anybody trying to tell you their website is worth $X dollars is more than likely trying to rip you off!

Let’s take a look on some of the more popular services:

Business Opportunities Weblog - The Net Fool is Worth $64,357.56
The Business Opportunities website value estimator is, sadly enough, one of the more popular measuring services around the web. While I cannot narrow down the exact metrics, it is evidentially drawn from Technorati. My Technorati rating is generally high when compared to my overall popularity, I am just good at using the service to increase my rank. But this means that the door is open for anyone to do as I did and artificially inflate the price of their websites. The Business Opportunities service grossly overestimates the value of my website.

YourWebsiteValue.com - The Net Fool is Worth $4,200
The system used at YourWebsiteValue.com projected what I think to be the most realistic price of my blog site. I feel that it is about correct, but this is not to say that the value was just “luck of the draw” (as I believe it was). I think that there is a lot of room to fudge the results and get an over-priced valuation. They use metrics like “popularity” and “recognition” which I believe are essential, so I have to say this turned out the most accurate for me.

EstiBot - The Net Fool is Worth $2,900
EstiBot is a decently fair way to value both your website and your domain name. They start out by estimating the value of your domain name (mine is apparently $130), and then apply things like rankings from Alexa, traffic and keywords to work out the value of your website. Again, not terrible, but overly reliant on pre-recorded rankings that can be artificially enhanced, thus inflating your “value.” I feel that the service aims too low for my price reasoning, but may even turn out the opposite for you!

CyberWyre - The Net Fool is Worth $1,342
The measures used in the CyberWyre ranking system are nothing more than a combination of things like Alexa rankings, Google Pagerank, and average backlinks. Because of this, sites that spam their link will receive huge leverage over those that do not. The $1,342 price valuation isn’t too far-fetched, but definitely undervalues my website by a considerable amount just because Google hasn’t given me the value I feel that I deserve.

Smart Page Rank - The Net Fool is Worth $245
Just three factors come into play for the Smart Page Rank valuation service, your appearance in Yahoo or DMOZ directories, number of backlinks, and indexed pages. Knowing this, I think that too much of a weight is put on the directory appearance. The DMOZ directory is becoming more and more unreliable as a ranking tool, and getting a listing in the Yahoo directories entails a purchase upwards of $250! Unfair, and a gross under-estimate of most blogs, including mine.

Site Value Calculator - The Net Fool is Worth $225
Like the Smart Page Rank, the website value estimator at SiteValueCalculator.com involves just three metrics: Alexa ranking, domain age, and number of backlinks. Why they decided to use domain age is beyond me, as I feel this estimates the domain name, rather than the website itself. What’s more, Alexa rankings are only recorded if the users browsing your website have the program installed on their computers when visiting. With Google cracking down on paid and other unmerited backlinks, the Site Value Calculator is a poor understatement of the value.

Website Value Calculator - The Net Fool is Worth $78
This is pretty much the bottom of the pile as far as quality goes. The WebsiteValueCalculator.com measure of my website’s value was a virtual train wreck at a measly $78 dollars. Knowing that they identified more than 5.1 million backlinks to my website… to turn around and offer a double-digit value is a bit ridiculous in my opinion. They weight far too heavily on pagerank for their own good, so if yours is unjustifiably low (like mine), you are going to get a horrible calculated value.

As you can see, while some services work a bit better than others, they can all be manipulated to an extreme degree and do not take their own metrics into effect properly. The most common problem involved is a heavy reliance on pagerank, which means absolutely nothing in reality. My best bet was YourWebsiteValue.com’s value calculator, but even this was not too accurate.

The bottom line: if you see someone advertising a sale price using one of these services, they are probably trying to exaggerate their net worth. As a rule of thumb, you will need to use your own intuition combined with these figures in order to figure out what your are worth.

-The Net Fool

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I recently came across TNX.net (pronounced “thanks”) on a recommendation from a thread on DigitalPoint. Lucky for me, the friendly guys at TNX came to me personally to ask for a review of their great service, something I was more than happy to do. These guys have everything you need to get started as an advertiser or webmaster, friendly support, organized statistics and great features that make it a nice alternative to other networks.

I have been using the TNX system for about one month at this point, and I gotta say I am impressed. Everything is so well laid out, and the advertising is quite affordable. I have seen a good amount of targeted traffic come from the ads I paid for with TNX.net, and the traffic I get is a lot more organic than the visits I get from search engines and other networks. I haven’t had a chance to give the service a fair trial as a publisher (webmaster), but from what I’ve heard its nothing but the best. In fact, a recent review from JimKarter.com shows an average of about $66/month (on around 3500 PR0 and PR1 backlinks) on a very generic website with a pagerank of 4. A solid turnout from a new service.

The payment method is done through what they call “TNX-points,” essentially a credit-based system of objectively buying and selling link space around the internet. I think this is pretty nice option, and there are some great opportunities to earn TNX-points if you are a publisher which you can later either use or convert to cash (roughly $1 per 1,000 points).

Let’s break down the system into Advertisers and Publishers:

Advertisers: I feel that the advertising users will have a great time using TNX to gain solid traffic. Why? Well the way they have their system laid out, it presents several advantages over the typical PPC (pay-per-click) networks in that you can avoid click fraud among other things, automated systems and link exchanges. A lot of the traffic you get from these places is unreliable, but with TNX, you get to narrow down exactly where you want your ads shown so your credits are not thrown away!

It’s very easy to create a new adverting campaign, and I like the fact that you don’t need to know all of the technical jargon that most other networks assume you already know. There are two main metrics that let you chose the Yahoo Backlinks & Google Pagerank that you would like the websites which are displaying your ads to have. Without the proper rankings, your ads don’t get shown! What’s more? You get the chance to narrow things down by category, and then you can even choose as specifically as using 10% of ads on an MMO blog with PR2, or 35% on an automobile e-zine with 300 Yahoo Backlinks. They even offer you a free link-generator that produces Google-friendly page links so you don’t get in trouble or banned form their engines. The features and the amount of detail that is put into every campaign is simply unbeatable.

Publishers: After initially accepting every kind of website (many raved of all their PR0 websites being elligible), the folks down at TNX.net have slightly upped the requirements, asking for pagerank 1.. .but not requiring it. If you cannot get into these other networks like NeverBlueAds and Text-Link-Ads, I think that you are in luck. So long as you actually have some good indexed content, the great support at TNX will approve your account . This is an ideal solution for those upstart websites that have yet to be realized to a full extent by engines and directories.

How does it all work? TNX gives you a code right from the get-go, and once you submit your website (very easy), you can start to advertise right away. Essentially, you tell the system what you have to offer, and they bring the traffic and revenue right to you! Prices you receive are calculated on a metric involving search engine rankings (not pagerank, thank goodness) and they even allow you to combine the services with other advertising brokers like Google’s Adsense or whoever floats your boat. But here comes the kicker: unlike other ad networks like Text-Link-Ads, you can display TNX ads on multiple pages, or even every page! Because you aren’t tied to your main page, your profitability might increase tenfold!

The features on both sides of the coin, advertisers and webmasters, offer huge advantages over other competing ad networks. The prices for advertisers are reasonable, and the placement and revenue for publishers is great. TNX.net is able to cut out waste by inviting more specific listings, and definitely pulls it out . The only disadvantage I can honestly say is that the system is new, but with 0.25% daily growth (or 89% annual growth) as an average, there is a cause for getting in on the action early. There is even a great affiliate program for those of us looking to invite some added earnings to our performance. With so many features, you gotta check out the TNX network.

-The Net Fool

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