Alexa Rank VS Blog Income
Before you read this post I recommend you take a glimpse at Paula’s List of Blogger Salaries. All the data presented here is pulled directly from her site or the sources she referenced.
If you’re like me you’ve been blogging for 3 months and starting to get some traffic. I’m sure you’ve also been trying to figure out whether it’s worth monetizing your site as well. I’ve actually taken a couple of very simple steps to see if there is a market for a blog that is only getting ~100 uniques per day. Who knows if I could be making more with 100 uniques. I actually emailed Darren something very similar to what I’m presenting here because I had no way to figure it out myself until I found Paula’s post. I ended up going through her list and pulling out all of the sites that were not blogs. That left me with 35 entries. Then I visited each of these sites and pulled their most current Alexa ranking. The entries have been sorted by ascending Alexa rank and are shown below.
| Blogger | Alexa | $$$ |
| ShoeMoney | 1816 | $120,000 |
| ProBlogger | 2616 | $120,000 |
| John Chow | 2728 | $140,500 |
| Steve Pavlina | 4026 | $365,000 |
| Entrepreneurs-Journey | 15502 | $78,000 |
| ConnectedInternet | 19330 | $77,000 |
| Coolest-Gadgets | 23551 | $153,600 |
| BuzzMachine | 43840 | $12,000 |
| KumikoSuzuki | 44635 | $1,700 |
| BusinessLogs | 46534 | $9,000 |
| LazyManAndMoney | 66144 | $4,700 |
| MenJ | 70377 | $14,000 |
| KingNomar | 71230 | $2,200 |
| EarnMoneyBlogging | 78129 | $5,000 |
| MubinAhmed | 87219 | $32,000 |
| LiveLearnInvest | 89945 | $1,800 |
| PaulaNealMooney | 89945 | $12,000 |
| CareerRamblings | 90116 | $124,465 |
| LeftBlank | 98133 | $6,600 |
| A2-blog | 111660 | $1,250 |
| WorkingNomad | 127707 | $9,000 |
| AllTipsAndTricks | 129181 | $2,300 |
| GeniusTypes | 130549 | $1,150 |
| MikesMoneyMakingMission | 131715 | $2,700 |
| GPSReview | 152332 | $50,000 |
| TheAnand | 199541 | $850 |
| NetBusinessBlog | 200821 | $12,000 |
| m3nghua | 205349 | $850 |
| DerekSemmler | 286635 | $1,102 |
| CourtneyTuttle | 288661 | $3,500 |
| InHorMoney | 349566 | $6,000 |
| Demp.se | 1026270 | $13,670 |
| ReviewZone | 1367483 | $3,944 |
| DollarJames | 1393874 | $470 |
| CrazyHamster | 1462762 | $1,385 |
| Ontora | 2109140 | $1,700 |
Small Alexa Rank = Big Money
As you would expect Alexa rank is directly proportional to the amount of annual income for each blog. Before all you haters start bashing me for using Alexa just chill out a minute. If it were plausible to collect unique visitors or pageviews for each I would have, but that’s simply not possible since all bloggers don’t list their site statistics with their incomes. Alexa is the only benchmark to approximate traffic equally across all sites on the web. I know it’s not the best measure of a sites traffic but at least its an apples to apples comparison for each site. The other thing to mention here is that most of these incomes are extrapolated out from a single months income. I also tried to remove any sites that received any income from other ventures.
Want to Make Money Online?
The answer is simple: get traffic. How much traffic is naturally the next question. The following is a plot of the data from above.
StevePavlina, Coolest-Gadgets, CareerRamblings, and GPSReviews have figured out how to break the mold or the annual income estimated is WAY off. My guess is that most of these sites are in a niche where they can sell other products to a select market to increase their income. There are only a handful of sites that are making annual incomes greater than $80,000. I hate to say it but by the looks of this chart the majority of us are never going to make it to Dot Com Mogul status. The rest seem to fall below the poverty line at under $15,000 per year. Here is a zoomed in shot of the data for blogs under $15,000.
As you can see it’s pretty hard to correlate any data here. What this does show you is that if you can manage an Alexa ranking somewhere around 100,000 or more you stand a pretty good chance of making money online. However there are tons and tons of factors that go into making money on your blog. If you notice there are some blogs ranked at ~50k but are only making $2000 where others are pulling $10k. What they share in common is a similar amount of traffic. Another point of interest is the average income of all blogs under $15k is $5k per year. At $5000 per year and spending an hour on each post you’d be making $13/hr. I guess thats pretty good money by some peoples standards.
Conclusion
I’m not hear to tell you whether or not to monetize your blog. You can decide that for yourself. What I can tell you is that until your Alexa rank encroaches on 100,000 you’re probably not going to make enough to litter your blog with adsense. I guess if you need the extra income to pay for hosting or another hobby then more power to you. I’m just happy to know that when this site hits 5000 on Alexa I’ll be a 6 figure blogger 
Cool list, but you have my Alexa way off. NetBusinessBlog.com’s Alexa rank is 20k not 200k
An excellent analysis. Any kind of traffic in general will cause a rise toward the top of search results. That is useful because the closer you are to the top the more likely a searcher is to find you in the search results. So General Traffic for the sake of improving your position in organic search is good.
So for that end you can join a click pool (Blog Explosion, Traffic Roundup, etc whatever) or you can pay Traffic Hoopla $10/wk for 1,000 site visits or whatever…organic is easy to get you just pay for it…after you eat and pay the utility bills
It is true that you might want this or that Alexa rating because it is a criteria that someone, whose ad you want to host, uses as a criteria. (Of course I say, make your own rules, use WP Text Ad plugin and make your own rules and sell your own space)
If you are earning money through ppc then you want traffic that is going to click ppc ads. If you are selling services or products or are an affiliate for some entity that is selling service or product, again the traffic you bring to the site needs to be traffic that is interested in buying.
To get the kind of traffic that is easily converted, it seems to me, requires for example an AdWords campaign in which your key word is a phrase of 3 words or more. Matt Ryan calls this a “long tail keyword”. “hotels” “hotels San Francisco” “hotels San Francisco Union Square” Which of those 3 is the long tail search phrase? Bingo. So which one should be you long tail keyword? Bingo. (you get a list of longtails you check to see which of that list are used by searcher-er and ignored by advertisers and THAT becomes YOUR keyword list–for ads for copy for the works)
Once my content is done and the sites submitted to the directories I will go back to the basics and determine a list of long tail key words most applicable to the sites that my site links to, I will then incorporate one or more of those long tails into the text of my site and into the landing page of my site that each adword campaign will bring visitors to.
I will go so far as to change the title of previous posts is that’s an efficient way of creating a landing page using the exact phrase match used by: searcher-ers who are being ignored by advertisers. That same set of long tails will be used in my adWords campaign and in the landing page , particularly in the first 200 words of text.
Sites with the same traffic may have different conversion rates because of the quality of traffic. Those that arrive in buying mode are those that get there as a result of doing a long tail google search (or whatever other SE).
It may or may not be the case that the incomes generated are reflective of the difference in conversion rates and of course the difference in profit margin on what is being sold…several variables.
The point that Alex Ranking seems to correlate inversely to income or that it is not correlated at all with income is telling. Maybe this will thow a little water on the frenzy about getting this or that Alexa ranking.
On the other hand. for many, this activity is actually purely social…about you know who has the nicest shoes, newest car, most visitors, like collecting avatars in a neighborhood or being a Technorati favorite or on the first page of Digg or whatever…
If we are here to make money they we need traffic that is in buying mode and we need their first impression (landing page) to be REFLECTIVE of exactly (keyword match) what they are looking for and make sure its clearly INSTRUCTIVE as to what they have to do to get what they came there for…not any distractions.
Lead them to water and then tell them. Got to keep it simple ONE call to action.
Yeah, nice post
Matt: Sorry about that. Yesterday I think Alexa took a crap when I made it to your site. I’ll update that for future reference.
Nia: Whoa! Biggest comment this blogs ever received
Thanks for taking the time.
wow, biggest comment I ever saw! I’m confused, not sure what to comment on, the post or the comment…
Anyway, very nice post, I had no idea how much money can be earned with great amount of traffic, I’m already thinking what my new top 10k alexa blog will be about lol… Any ideas?
Very interesting post about the relationship between Alexa rank and earnings. As someone that made the list, I’d have to agree that the more traffic your site receives the better your chances of earning a more substantial income.
Since I’m down near the bottom of that Alexa rank and income list, I’d welcome all the additional traffic to see if we can prove this to be true.
interesting analysis here and thanks for putting my site in your list. Let’s see how good it will be with the alexa ranking
You did a great analysis. Despite the fact that Alexa is not so accurate, it seems that the higher you rank, the bigger probabilities that you’ll make more money.
Good job on that post buddy, and that was a great comment from Nia. Let’s hope the next time you post that list, you and I will be there heh
Amazing list and I’m proud to be on it, I’ve got to agree on your point of smaller websites; I’m feeling it’s becoming harder and harder to make (a lot of) money on smaller websites; CPM/CPC ads just don’t pay a lot with few visitors and it’s hard to get direct deals as a small fish.
Nonetheless I’m making a nice amount of money on the web with my hobby, especially for a 18-years old
Interesting idea to try find a correlation there. I’m on your list, but I don’t make a penny from my blog, it’s from Adsense I run on other websites, so I shouldn’t be there
Thanks anyway
I was so happy to find the real legitimate opportunities which guaranteed money from the comfort of my home. As there are so many scams on the web which are bogus.
interesting analysis, wow 120,000 for blogging is a great deal. Keep up the good blogging.
Cant wait for your latest posts!