I’ve been asked by a few people lately on how my personal site, Jeffro2pt0.com obtained a decent Alexa Ranking. Considering my rank is just under 100,000 I’m not sure if that is considered low, decent, or a great score but I figured I’d tell you the promotion technique I used which contributed to the score.
My Focus:
When I started the site back in June of 2007, my sole purpose was to review new sites and services that were popping up thanks to the Web2.0 craze. Generally what I would do is watch a few different RSS feeds that showcased brand new sites or services that went online. An example would be KillerStartups.com. Any site or service that launched that seemed remotely interesting I would pick up and review. The big difference between my blog and the big boys was that, I was taking the time writing thorough, well instructed reviews complete with pictures and sometimes, invite codes.
The Tactic
Here in lies the secret. Once I reviewed a new startup, I contacted someone from the site/service and told them I had written a review and would appreciate a mention of it on their blog or, a link to the review. More often than not, they published a link to either my blog or the review. Sometimes, the service would place a permanent link to my review on their About Page. Why did I choose this promotion technique?
The strategy behind what I was doing is simple. Considering Jeffro2pt0 was a fresh blog that didn’t even have a year under its belt, I couldn’t afford to pay for advertising. However, I knew that if the site I reviewed ended up becoming the next best thing on the web, having my link somewhere on their site would benefit me as their pagerank as well as the alexa rank increased. I would end up receiving follow through traffic on top of search engine traffic from people searching the services name.
How It Paid Off:
InviteShare was a brand new service that allowed users to share their invitations to new Web 2.0 services which were sprouting up across the web like weeds. It was the first website of it’s kind. Jeff, the owner of the site was gracious enough to place a banner from Jeffro2pt0 onto the front page of InviteShare as one of the sites which had reviewed the service.
This move proved to be the one that put my site on the map as TechCrunch and all of the other major news outlets reported on InviteShare. Because a link to my site was on their front page, all of that follow through traffic appeared on my blog. TechCrunch later purchased InviteShare and the rest is history.
Conclusion:
Will this technique still work? Considering new sites and services are always coming online looking for exposure, getting in touch with the owner and letting them know that you graciously reviewed the service and would appreciate a link of some kind in return probably still works. It’s a win-win situation for both parties unless of course, your review was critical of the site/service. Thanks to some high profile links, my site reached a PageRank of 4 within its first six months of being online. Not bad I’d say!
8 thoughts on “Old School Promotion Technique That Worked”
That is a good strategy in general – regardless of Alexa rank effects. I ignore all link and exchange requests… But link to my site and then contact me (or just use trackback…) and there is a chance for a link back.
Great simple tip. I think this kind of thinking can really be widely applied.
never really thought of that, seems like a great technique though. I think I might try writing a review for a couple of my front page google competition for my fishing blog and see how that goes…
Great advice. I think you can apply this in any niche by just reviewing new blogs and then asking for a link to the review.
I am not sure about Alexa as well.
That’s a smart and simple strategy. It’s easy to overlook something like that. PR 4 within 6 months is definitely not shabby.
I’m not sure what to think of Alexa now. In the “old days”, the Alexa toolbar was primarily used by webish folk, so if you were writing about html, seo and all that, you’d get a good score.
Now they say the rank is based on toolbar use “and data collected from other, diverse sources” – those are unidentified sources and there’s no “Alexa code” like Quantcast et al. for webmasters to help them out with.
I do know that just putting the Alexa score banner up can increase your score slightly – I averaged around 60K before adding their banner and now run around 45K.
Your point about advising people of your reviews is a good one. I’ve never once thought to do that!
Jeff, great tip here. And one that I ignore all too often. You nailed it:
“Once I reviewed a new startup, I contacted someone from the site/service”
It’s called flatter-bait.
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