When I started out working online, I created lots of niche blogs.
The aim was to get each one ranked on page one of Google for relevant keywords.

What I found extremely frustrating was the amount of hard work needed with no real sign of progress. Traffic was very erratic.
How I would have loved to get some measure of progress and value for each blog post.

Instead, I spent hours checking how each site was ranked by Google – a very rough and ready process lacking any reliable repeatable results.

Last year I invested in Chris Freville and Paul Teague’s 7 Figure Success Formula.
Their recommendation was to monitor progress using Alexa..com
That’s what I have been doing for this site for the last few weeks.

I have not bothered to focus on SEO or any particular keyword yet – not driven any traffic here. So the site doesn’t bother using header tags for keywords – because I am not targeting any yet.
stevemackay.com had nothing other than a virgin WordPress Blog for over a year.
Then on 19 April 2012 I reconstructed the site to follow John Thornhill’s One Month Mentor training course.

Initially I posted new content daily for a few weeks then started posting at less regular intervals.
To date I have posted 37 articles – averaging about one every 3 days.

Here’s what I have found:
stevemackay.com Alexa ranking was about 11,150,000 when I first checked a couple of weeks ago.
Each time I make a new blog post, the Alexa ranking goes up by about 15,000.

Google Analytics reports the small amount of traffic (apart from me!) rises then falls to about half if I don’t post for a day then almost disappears the day after.

There are about 185 million active websites online.
So achieving an Alexa ranking of about 1.8 million means being in the top 1% of sites – and hopefully making the sort of income earned by many of the top sites!

Failing to do anything special – such as adding backlinks or driving traffic – a rough and ready estimate suggests I would need about 623 blog posts to get to a top 1% position. This would take about 2 years with one post a day.
Maybe less posts are needed – because improvements to my Alexa ranking has actually been accelerating as I post more regularly?
Or maybe more posts are needed – because if things start to get tougher as ranking improves and competition becomes stronger.

Either way, Alexa seems to be a very useful and easy way to measure a site’s progress.