I have been using a FireFox Add-on called SearchStatus for the past few months. It allows the user to view the Google PageRank, Alexa Rank and with the latest update the Compete Rank.

The Add-on is simple to install and unobtrusive, you do not have to click on anything to get a PageRank, it simply displays these ranks in the lower right ‘status’ bar of the browser.

I have not been familiar with Compete prior to the update of SearchStatus; it looks like this is the brainchild of Bill Gross creator of GoTo which eventually became Overture. According to the Compete.com About page, the concept which is based on click-sharing is designed to help by notifying users about whether or not sites are ‘safe’; what traffic sites receive and how that compares to other sites; and finally, provides promotion codes which could save users money on retail sites at the time of check out.

To click-share or not to click-share, that is the question… What do you think about letting somebody, anybody monitor your clicks? Do you really believe that claims of anonymous click-sharing are really anonymous?

I joined the “Increasing Alexa Rank - A Joint Experiment” from Everton’s site on March 27th, 2007. It has been a little over six weeks since beginning the experiment and I have noticed some very interesting and significant results.

I stopped writing weekly updates to the site, because I needed to focus on my business and updating some other affiliate sites, like www.quote-compare-save.com - Even so, with one article on Alexa rank, an Alexa category created and the sidebar widget installed, my rank improved about 100,000 from 370,000 to 274,000

It is interesting how minor changes even if you are not updating content so frequently can gain ranking… I still think that Alexa is, for the most part easily “scammed” - but, to my knowledge, I am not doing anything to scam Alexa on my site, so, I do not think that argument is as valid for my part of the experiment.

Good hunting!

Do you ever feel as an affiliate that you have a hard time keeping track of where the money is going?

That is the question, isn’t it?

I have stopped using them for quite a while now, over a year…

About 2 months ago, I took a look at their products again and it was still the same ol’ crap. More “get rich quick” ebooks, along with various “free” scams. I’m not suggesting that some of the products they provide may actually have some sort of value, but, the majority are very poor quality or lend themselves to less than “ethical” ideas and practices.

It seems that a larger ‘net population is becoming aware of the lack of quality at Clickbank and it is showing at various traffic tracking sites like Alexa (see the “The Death of Clickbank” by Earnersblog)

Just like the re-affirmed decision I made a couple of months ago, I will NOT Clickbank until they provide higher quality products which I will be proud to offer to clients and have associated with my name and reputation.

Well, I find myself in a bit of a conundrum - I need to operate my regular daily business, and I am developing or re-designing an old affiliate site… for the past 2 weeks, I have been re-designing it, and coming up with new and original content… and it eats all of my time, so, Bloglyne.com suffers. I cannot keep up with comments at communities which I normally frequent, and so I am slowly seeing my traffic die down and my Yahoo! links dwindle.

What is to be done?

I would imagine many of you out there have faced similar dilemmas - It would be interesting to hear from you and how you resolved them… for now, I am hoping that the time slicing will be enough for me to keep from reaching the bottom.

For those faithful readers, thank you for your continued diligence and interest in the site. Again, I put the call out for anybody who would like to add original content here for an outside link back to their site, as well as some sort of text advertising. Email me at admin at bloglyne dot com - and we can discuss details.

Here is an idea I just thought up over the past couple of days.

Because I am still working on developing a consistant base of readers, why not open the door to other authors to help shape and contribute to the content here at Bloglyne?

Instead of charging people for advertising at Bloglyne, I thought it might be interesting to look for 2 - 3 authors who would like to publish unique articles here - The idea is that, as long as the content is original and related to Affiliate/Internet Marketing, SEO, or Website Design, the authors would be able to publish their unique articles here with one way links back to whatever site they wish.

Please leave comments about what you think about the idea or if you are interested in becomming a contributing author, send an email to admin@bloglyne.com

I recently ran across a brief summary post on Connected Internet which referred to an article at DoshDosh highlighting 20 specific tips to improve your Alexa rank.

Most of the steps seem fairly straight forward and ethical, here are 5 that I consider practical to implement quickly:

1. Install the Alexa toolbar or Firefox’s SearchStatus extension and set your blog as your homepage. This is the most basic step.
2. Put up an Alexa rank widget on your website. I did this a few days ago and receive a fair amount of clicks every day.
3. Encourage others to use the Alexa toolbar or SearchStatus extension. This includes friends, fellow webmasters as well as site visitors/blog readers.
8. Write content that is related to webmasters. This can fall in the category of domaining and SEO, two fields in which most webmasters will have the Alexa toolbar installed. Promote your content on social networking websites and webmaster forums.
14. Create an Alexa category on your blog and use it to include any articles or news about Alexa. This acts as a resource for webmasters while helping you rank in the search engines.

Some of the tips seem a little “shady” to me like step 4 which talks about installing the Alexa toolbar or SS Firefox extension on all computers in your office and setting your website as the homepage for all browsers on said office computers.

DoshDosh has great articles which provide good and practical tips on how to improve traffic and ranking to your site – Check him out at DoshDosh.com

All in all, I think it would be an interesting experiment for folks to implement the tips they feel comfortable with over the next 30 days and track what happens to their Alexa rank along with their Text Link Ads and ReviewMe profits (since both sites use Alexa ranking to determine what amount to charge for ads on your site).

Good luck and let us know what happens.

Note: I was not going to include this review on this site, as it did not seem relevant, but after having received numerous comments on the review given at Stackblog, I thought it might be alright to include it here. After all, a lot of affiliates are providing links to this video - so, without further ado, here is my review.

As a Christian, it is obvious to identify serious issues with Christianity and The Secret if you do not temper it with the tenets of our Faith.

Again, I am still in process on this one - but where it really crosses the line is when one of the “Teachers”, Lisa Nichols, says that you are “God manifested in human form.”

According to my Christian belief, Jesus was the only one who was truly God manifested in human form.

So, I am not okay with that statement from The Secret, but what I am okay with is modifying the statement to realize and remind myself that I am a creation by God in His image.

Make no mistake, just like many philosophies put out there by humans, there are real problems with some of what the Secret says, but, I do not think The Secret was made by Christians, so why should we use that measuring stick?

Now, if we choose to apply anything out of The Secret, we must be careful to remember the basics of our Faith and use our Faith to judge anything we choose to apply. But, remember, that can be said for anything we apply and use in our lives as Christians.

I do not see why these two things, “The Law of Attraction” and Christianity must be exclusive to one another. In fact, I believe that the Universe is part of God’s creation, and when God set it into motion he did so with certain laws in place for it to operate under.

Everything humans have made (I did not say created, because, this is also where The Secret misses it - we are NOT Creators of the energy discussed in the movie. God is the Prime Mover and Creator of everything. God does allow us to shape it though.) Everything we have made, we have made with the building blocks of the universe God created for us to exist in.

So, why should our Faith and The Law of Attraction be exclusive? The Law of Attraction is one of the laws that the universe operates under. Another way to think about this, as I have applied the lesson to my life is that the universe hates a void, and if you create a void by declaring a need - the universe will rush in to fill it. Good, bad, or indifferent - so we must be careful what we declare.

The universe and God are two separate things, of course. I do not thank the universe, it is a thing created by God. I thank God. I ask God, that if something is his will, that I would have it, regardless of what it would be. For example, I ask that if it is in His will that he would give me patience, love, kindness, the ability to forgive, I ask him for my daily bread, and by that, I mean, money, food, shelter, clothing, more than enough to meet not only my needs, but the needs of my family, along with the needs of others. It is scary! It is a scary thing to put yourself into the hands of the living God. Although, we would do well to remember that there is nothing to be scared about – God is not the evil step father waiting to punish us. He is the anxious father waiting for us to turn to him through Christ so he can sweep us off our feet.

I believe it is our tendency to take something like The Secret and dismiss it as a whole because there are things in it that make us uncomfortable, and we do not trust ourselves to discern the good and right things from the bad things in it and rightly so. Because if you still trust yourself for anything, you are heading into dangerous territory – we can all be fooled, every last one of us.

But, if you trust God to peel the scales away from your eyes, and allow that if anything is right and good and just and within His will that He will allow His discernment to guide you. You can trust that He will guide you and that you will be alright.

Just read a couple of interesting articles about the decline of Web 2.0 in venture capital circles and the advent of Web 3.0

The authors describe the “killer apps” currently being offered are very similar to each other, many take after the Technorati, Gigaom or Wikipedia “skins”. The challenge with these “killer apps” is that they are still just applications stuck in the old and out-dated form of HTML or XHTML.

The authors ask, ‘Where the truly new and innovative opportunities are in the Web 2.0 landscape?’ While we have seen solutions to cost and access to distinct compiled data, the question remains, when and how do we make the transition to the Web as a true platform rather than just a clumsy way to show text?

Even with the transition to CSS and XHTML, we are still using old & clumsy conventions which you must know how to manipulate at a Developer level, if you are going to have any hope of displaying something meaningful.

I see attempts being made to solve these questions about innovation through offerings like Squidoo and the newer Blogger interface, but, I think we are still a little way out from the “killer app” status where we can provide cheap and easy access to manipulate data which is stored on the web easily and uniquely via intuitive interfaces.