The primary reason I write this blog is outreach and one of the methods of measuring outreach is alexa rankings. However, since alexa ONLY measures the web activity of people, who use the alexa toolbar, and since those people tend to be webmasters, and since earlyretirementextreme.com is apparently not read by a whole lot of webmasters, my alexa ranking is somewhat low(*).

Now, the problem of alexa basing rankings on the browsing habits of web professionals is known, but that does not prevent people from using them. Hence, much like schools and employers select for GPA rather than actual education due to its convenience, this is a problem we must contend with to get anywhere in the world and thus we strive to improve our ratings. In my case, the problem is that this puts me on page two of the canonical wisebread list of pf blogs.

(*) Unfortunately, no one seem to like my eyeball metric which measures how much time is spent each day reading the site. By that measure, earlyretirementextreme.com clocks in at 107 hours/day compared to wisebread.com’s 236 hours/day or thesimpledollar.com’s 269 hours/day. In comparison to these pf giants ERE’s count is not bad (I mean AWESOME).

Now, apparently, it would be possible to get a rank <100,000 if just 100 daily ERE readers, that is, 5% of subscribers of 10% of the daily unique visitors, installed the alexa toolbar in their browsers (click on the link to get to the donwload page and see what it looks like). This would definitely move ERE up to the first half of the front page.

Many have asked what they can do to support this blog. If you regularly read this blog online, installing the alexa toolbar (it’s free) would very likely help if enough people do it.

Another way would be to write a short review of the blog. You do not need an alexa account to do this. You can log in via facebook.

Either way, any assistance is much appreciated!

Originally posted 2010-02-18 15:52:15.