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Plug Your Book!
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the Web) to about 5 million, meaning very low readership. For the top
100,000 sites, Alexa provides detailed traffic estimates. Under the
heading Explore this site, you’ll see these links:
Traffic Details shows the blog’s relative reach and number of page
views, and whether traffic is trending up or down.
Related Links shows other sites popular with the same audience.
Here you can discover more blogs frequented by your target audience.
Sites Linking In shows which sites, ranked by authority, have
incoming links to the blog. Follow these links, and you’ll find more sites
targeting your audience.
Depending on how narrowly focused your book is, you may find only
a few relevant quality blogs, and that’s fine. It’s better to focus on a
small, well-qualified audience who will respond to your book instead of
a general audience where you’ll have little impact.
Alexa’s reports aren’t foolproof; they’re drawn from a small sample
of Web users who use its browser toolbar. Rankings for high-traffic sites
are more statistically accurate than reports for niche sites. In any case,
Alexa is a handy, free source of objective information about Web traffic,
and is more accurate than anecdotal reports. Bloggers and Webmasters
are notorious for overestimating their traffic.
Alexa, which is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, isn’t limited to blogs,
so you can use it to find all sorts of Web sites targeting your niche.
Another good source of traffic estimates is www.MetricsMarket.com.
Google PageRank
Another way of determining how much juice a blog has is Google
PageRank. It’s a patented method Google uses to rank the importance
of Web sites on a scale of one to 10 based on the authority of incoming
links. Google offers a free toolbar you can use to check rankings:
Quality blogs and Web sites will have a PageRank of at least five. To
determine PageRank, check the blog’s main page or a Web site’s home
page; other pages often are unranked.
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