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.

If you’re like me, you’ll value your time pretty highly.
And that presents a real problem when trying to learn something new.

You’ll need training to go into enough detail so you can understand it.
But you really don’t want it to go at such a snails pace that you switch off before it gets anywhere near explaining the bits you are really interested in.

For example, every week I am inundated with emails offering free webinars to learn how to make money online more easily, more quickly and with no risk.
Unfortunately they almost all overlook your most valuable resource – your time.

Usually I’ll sign up for two or three that promise to teach me something useful.
From maybe 6 hours of webinars, I’ll typically spend less than an hour learning the things I find useful.
Download my $17 report showing you “How to Save Half the Time You Spend Watching Webinars” while it’s still available at your favourite price = free.
And discover how I save myself hours of non-productive time each week.
No opt-in needed.

Cut Your Time In Half

Over the years I have listened to guru’s explaining the ways they make money online.
And I find most of them suggest methods that I am really not comfortable following.
For example, the first training course I spent $2000 on was from Ryan Deiss teaching how to make membership sites. Apart from recommending ‘forced membership opt-in’ Ryan also taught where to find free ‘filler content’ to use on your site to pad out the one or two high value unique products each month.

This may be a great easy way to avoid hard work.
But also a sure fire way to waste members time discovering real value in the content.

One of my favourite guru’s is Jason Fladlein.
Jason understands that something short, sharp and to the point has much higher value alternatives that are long and drawn out – whether webinars, ebooks, audios or videos.

Why do training webinars typically last 2 hours or more?
Most people’s attention span is limited to under an hour.
Sure the last 30 minutes is usually devoted to selling some product or service.
But can anyone keep providing high quality content for the rest of the time?
I don’t think so because it actually takes more time and effort to distil the essence of an idea to produce something brief and succinct yet keeping all essentials details.

The browser I use most of the time is Firefox.
Over the years I’ve tried and tested lots of different “addons” – or plug-ins.
Addons are great when you use them but most slow Firefox down – so I only enable the ones I need to use.

Although I still have SEO Quake installed, I rarely spend time on SEO so keep it installed but disabled.
ReloadEvery is quite useful to help get Youtube videos jump started by getting the number of view for new videos up to a hundred or two.

A few months ago my copy of Thunderbird crashed – and I had no idea the damage this could cause.
Unfortunately I have gradually moved years on email archives into folders on my laptop – all stored by Thunderbird. What I didn’t understand was that when things go wrong it’s a real pain to restore everything.
Meanwhile I’m still accessing a few AOL email accounts directly from AOL – and that has to be one of the worst spammy websites around. Full of ads, videos and links.
But unless you use Outlook or Thunderbird, it’s the easiest way to access AOL emails.

I also discovered Microsoft have managed to prevent Outlook 2002 from working on Windows 7. Some module is no longer compatible and Microsoft have no plans to produce a fix. Probably no coincidence that this is the last version that doesn’t need Microsoft Activation each time it’s installed on a different PC.

The Adobe Flash video  addon is great when it works, but a real pain when it crashes – which is far too often. And this happens even more regularly with sites such as AOL
Things got so bad that I found myself enabling and disabling the Flash plugin many times every day.

Until I discovered FlashBlock – my favourite Firefox addon by far.

Now NO video can play in my browser unless I decide to let it!
It really has put me back in control of websites, pop-ups and pop-unders.

No longer can they start auto-playing videos – or locking up my browser for minutes at a time when Adobe Flash crashes.

If you don’t use FlashBlock – I can recommend giving it a try.
Great value at a price we all like = free.

By the way, it’s been another beautiful sunny day by the sea again today.
Even though it’s a work day there have been thousands of small sailing boats out enjoying the good weather while lasts.