Three children later.

I’ve not written regularly in some time. I miss crafting, blogging, commenting and socializing online!! I’ve been out of the loop, a sleepwalker, effectively in the social media pits. I’ve been re-fueling, bed-resting, nursing, sleeping (very little) and playing, homeschooling, reading and learning along with my little ones.

I want to come out and play again!

I realized just now that there are a bunch of things I did in the past couple of years, that I could have blogged about. I’m actually lamenting the fact that I didn’t blog them, because blogging seems to be such an effective way to record personal history. We write, as eloquently as we can, about our experiences, and try to take and post beautiful pictures of the event. You can even have books printed of your blog, to keep as mementos! Since nearly all of us are using digital cameras now, I think printing these blog books is a great way to keep photo and family history albums without all that work *blech*.

Since I took this hiatus from blogging, my site’s traffic has dropped into the proverbial toilet. Guess what my Alexa rating is…no really, just guess. Ok, as of this moment, it’s 3,342,437. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Alexa rankings, that basically means that I have little to no traffic at all. That’s ok with me. In fact, I’m enjoying the challenge of bringing it back up again. Let’s make a goal together right now. hmmmm. I’d like to have my Alexa BELOW 500,000 by January 1, 2011. There. That’s a nice goal. Now, how to go about it?

Alexa is primarily a tool for web developers. Did you know that? It wasn’t intended to be used by advertisers to gauge a website’s traffic or value. It’s in fact, a poor choice because it’s so tailored toward the development community, and isn’t widely used outside of that. If your blog has nothing to do with blogging, making money online, programming, web site creation, etc., then you won’t have as high an Alexa ranking as other sites with those genres. EVER. So, why do companies use Alexa at all? I have no idea. *epic eye roll*.

Getting my Alexa ranking up to par is going to be a bit of a challenge. It would be easy if all I had to do was write regularly, Tweet regularly and post it all to my Facebook Fan page to increase my traffic. Unfortunately, since Alexa is so targeted to web developers, I’ve got to do some creative scheming to get my numbers reduced.

The first thing I did (in face just before starting on this post today) is download an extension for Firefox for Alexa called SearchStatus. Next, I need to use that to visit my blog every day, or have my Mozilla homepage set to http://yourimpactmatters.com. That’ll work. However, I’m just one person. I need A LOT of folks to do the same thing, which can really only come from me creating valuable content. I’m working on it folks!

Next, I installed an Alexa Rank Widget to my blog. Even with it’s paltry numbers, I’m told that it will help to get more clicks and slowly bring those numbers to where I need them to be.

I have a further strategy for bringing my Alexa rank down, and I’d like to share that with you all! I’ll be writing more in the next week about my progress and the things I’m doing, step by step. I hope you’ll join me!

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