Zen Zoomie’s Place: Chronicles of a (Wannabe) Pro Blogger

Over the weekend I’ve been doing some research into alternative revenue generation strategies for my new blog. One that looks promising is pay-per-post blogging networks. Dosh Dosh recently ran a good article that provides a fairly comprehensive list of paid blogging networks, and describes how they work. As I dug into the idea some more, I discovered that several of the paid blogging networks rely on something called Alexa Rank when deciding if you will get any business—and how much you will be paid.

My Alexa Rank? A whopping “no data”. I now have a new mission—to increase the Alexa Rank of my website enough to encourage potential advertisers and the pay-per-post networks that I am worthy of their business.

After some quick Google research, I found that one of the suggested ways to kick-start your Alexa ranking is to install the Alexa toolbar, and make www.zenzoomie.com my homepage. I immediately ran into my first problem: Alexa toolbar doesn’t work on Firefox. Bummer. I conceded and installed the Alexa toolbar for Internet Explorer—or at least I thought I did.

Apparently Norton 360 (which I use as my antivirus, antiphishing, antispyware solution) recognizes the Alexa toolbar as spyware. This is fair since Alexa Toolbar really is spyware and transmits personally recognizable data back to Alexa home station, but I know that and still want to install it. A full hour later I still haven’t figured out how to configure Norton 360 to allow Alexa to stay installed. At any rate, I’ve now added my Alexa Rank badge to the left side of www.zenzoomie.com.

Keep an eye on it as it gradually creeps from “no data” into a respectable range.