A Hotshot Blogger

Media have it’s magic, it will make something awful really nice because of good publicity. It’s really hard to become popular in the internet but in television you can attract a lot of visitors. Maybe that is a quick way for a blogger to become famous by exposing themselves thru those kinds of media and also by using magazines telling all those things that they are so and so famous about their craft.

I didn’t mean all of them are fake but there are some who are really famous like for example Abe Olandes of Yugatech. But there are some who like to show themselves as a hot shot or something which makes people curios and creates some kind of doubt to other bloggers in the blog sphere if those really are famous and if their websites receives lots of traffic and earns a lot of money.

If you are one of those curious people who wants to check the popularity of a website or a blog, you can check it out in Alexa to know their traffic rankings here: http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_500

It’s not that accurate and you will not know the exact numbers of visitors the site you wanted to know but at least it will tell you if the site is really that famous or have tons of traffic. Page rank is another indicator if the site have some authority but it can’t be a good indicator if the site have lots of visitors. Traffic or visitors is the most important element of a site to make it famous and earn a good income. Without traffic, it is worthless no matter how good or beautiful a site is.

So to know something about the site, first thing you do is get the URL of the website you want to check. In this case let us pick a really famous pinoy blogger like http://www.yugatech.com then go to http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_500 and type the URL on the box just left of the “Get Traffic Details” button. See illustration below.

Then hit the “Get Traffic Details” button and the next page will show the “Traffic History Graph” on the middle of the page (See Below). Just having a graph will tell you that the site have a substantial amount traffic. Looking at the graph, the horizontal plane are the months and the vertical plane is the reach. The “Months” in the example you see below are from November 2007 to April 2008 which is very simple to understand. The “Reach” measures the number of users. Reach is typically expressed as the percentage of all Internet users who visit a given site. So, for example, if a site like yahoo.com has a reach of 28%, this means that if you took random samples of one million Internet users, you would on average find that 280,000 of them visit yahoo.com. Alexa expresses reach as number of users per million.

I really have a hard time figuring it out myself because the explanation in the Alexa help page seems obscure. I found a better explanation from the forum (highlighted in bold above). So in the example graph from yugatech.com, we can approximate about 35 visitors per million visitors. How did I get 35 ? in the graph its hard to tell but when you scroll down the page you will see the reach for Yugatech have 0.00351% (See below). So its at least its 35 visitors per 1 million visitors. To get the number of the estimated traffic yugatech website is getting, we should divide all the internet users in the world with 1 million and then multiply it to 35. That would be impossible, I mean to know how many are all the internet users in the world but at least this tool can be used to compare the site you are checking to other popular websites.

So the next time you read in a magazine or watched from a TV show that claims they are popular, you can use this tool to know the truth.