Good grief! It works!

Since I decided to get into Internet Marketing, I must have read about all the tricks that the gurus push in their eBooks about earning revenue, directing traffic to your site, search engine optimisation etc.
Fortunately, it didn't take me long to discover that you don't actually have to pay for these ebooks to find out the information, because somebody somewhere will have written an article about it and published it on their own site or in their blog.

Anyway, I decided to give Blog & Ping a try. Basically, you write a blog, like this one. Doesn't matter if no-one reads it - just write it. Write about something related to one of your own web sites and add a link to your site. Then Ping the blog directories and sit back. What happens then is that your blog gets listed in the directories, and the search engines scan the directories and the blogs for content. Bingo! Your website address gets discovered by the search engines and indexed much more quickly than if you submit it manually.
And then as the search engines keep seeing your web site's address mentioned over and over again in various blog directories, it gives your site a higher rank.

Another cunning little trick is with relation to Alexa. If you run the Alexa Toolbar while surfing the net, each page you go to is logged as a hit by Alexa. It's smart enough to know that people might abuse this by hitting there own site several times, so it limits it to one hit by each unique visitor per day.

Why do you suppose so many of the gurus give away their own customised versions of the Alexa Toolbar?

Some of my own sites suddenly jumped in the Alexa ranks this weekend. They were down at quite low places (still are, but at least they're moving up).
I had moves of up 356, up 2,008,347, up 2,764,504 and up 1,480,987 for my 4 main sites.

So, if you have a site that people keep coming back to, such as a niche article site, then you really need to Blog about it, and Ping the directories.
And if you can get your visitors to install the Alexa Toolbar (maybe a customised version of it), then all the better.