Alexa Slap: Do Unto Others…..

Ever feel the Alexa Slap across your face? Never heard of it? That’s because I just made it up. Although I made it up, it exists people. At least in my world.

I am sure you want to know what I am talking about. So here goes….about two weeks ago, I decided to do a little test. Nothing like testing molecular components or anything, just a little testy test.

Some Background

A while back I conducted a blog commenting experiment with Ana Hoffman over at Traffic Generation Cafe. The link above will give you the inside scoop, but the basic premise was to determine the ROI on blog commenting. Would it drive traffic and would that traffic convert to loyalty?

It does. Truly. So, I decided 2 weeks ago to try the other side of the coin.  And oh wow, the horror.

The Blog Comment Experiment #2

Stop commenting for two weeks. Stop Twittering for two weeks. Stop Facebooking. Stop visiting. Just write.

Now, what a disaster that produced. I took the selfish instead of selfless route and my stats showed it. Especially Alexa, hence the Alexa slap.

When I started the experiment, my Alexa rank was just about to hit 71,000. Very happy about that. 🙂 See, the dance I’m doing?!

Now, 2 weeks later, my Alexa rank is nearing 75,000. OUCH. In just two weeks time I fell almost 4,000 points.

Most of us assume the Alexa toolbar jumps in our favor when other toolbar users visit our sites. I believe that to be true for the part, but I think at some point there are definitive formulas used to compute rank.

After Effects

Not only did this travesty occur, my comments dropped by 60%! That is HUGE. I don’t like that on single bit and I am throwing a temper tantrum right now.

What happened on a positive note was that I kept writing my posts, optimizing them and my search engine visits increased by about 3% in that two week period. Good to know.

While I want more search engine exposure, I am an attention hog…I need people. Real live human beings to engage with. Sure, I like the searchers too, but I missed out on two weeks of building relationships.

What I can tell you is the impact began within the first 4 days. Twitter especially played a part. I removed myself from Twitter to determine the impact… my RT’s, mentions and hey how are ya’s vanished.

We are only as prominent as our last tweet, comment, like, etc. If we vanish, people forget. Not out of dislike, but many of us have 100’s of places we visit. It’s easy to get lost in the shuffle.

Renewed Hope

I feel strongly enough that I can build new relationships that I am not overly concerned about the drops. I know how to engage the community and find a happy medium.

My advice however is this: don’t take too long of a break when you get blog burnout. If you can’t write or comment, utilize another medium to stay in touch. Hop on Twitter and RT some links for people. Facebook it up. Just don’t try this experiment at home!! 🙂

If I were to keep up this way of doing things, I am 100% certain The Friendly Blogger would go under. It would fall into the abyss never to climb out again. Sure I could totally pump up the search engine visitors, but then I am just like a Walmart or something.

The Bottom Line

Find your balance. While conducting trail and error, DO NOT remove social interaction from your game plan. Unless of course you are trying to fail.

Balancing writing, social media, engagement, monetization, etc takes work. Be sure you can dedicate the appropriate amount of time to each….and if you can’t, outsource some pieces of the pie.

In closing, if you felt abandoned by me and missed me horribly 🙂 I am back on the scene again. It was a hard experiment to conduct, but it needed to be done.

I know that you wait daily to hear from me and read my comments on your posts, so you can relax now. :))))

Let me have it! What do you think causes blogs to be forgotten?