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Now before this post results in thirty comments saying how inaccurate Alexa’s site popularity measurement is, I completely agree. The matter of the fact is that some advertising agencies still use Alexa to price how much you will earn for advertising on your blog. If you can improve your Alexa rank, it will mean that you will can more money. I will include a few free techniques as well as some cheap paid ones.

Synopsis:
If you are looking for really basic methods and a introduction to Alexa, check out DoshDosh’s guide. I am going to skip all of the basic stuff and provide a few easy methods to maximize your Alexa rank quickly.

It is a common fact that you need an Alexa toolbar installed to improve your Alexa rank and that only computer savvy individuals would have it installed. Knowing this, targeting kids who are on the computer for less than 10 minutes a day would include very few with an Alexa toolbar installed. Instead, targeting computer users who are known to search engine optimize and make money blogging would have a much higher average for who has the toolbar installed. Now that you know these kinds of visitors would increase your Alexa more, lets move on to finding them and getting them to visit your blog.

Free Options:
Digitalpoint is the king of all webmaster forums. If you do not believe me, scroll to the bottom of any post and check out the activity. At the time of this post, there are 2,386 currently active users. Over 99% of Digitalpoint users own at least one website or blog, and so a lot of them use the Alexa toolbar. Now the trick is to getting as many DP users to your blog as possible in the shortest amount of time. Here are a few free tips I recommend:

1. Make a post in the introductions thread, state what you blog about as well as your URL.
2. Make a post in the reviews thread, asking what people think about your design and your SEO. (It does not matter if you have the nicest design in the world, you want lots of people looking and responding to the thread, this will help boost your Alexa rank).
3. If you run a contest, submit it to the contest thread.
4. Start a stumble exchange thread in the freebies thread. This will also help bring lots of traffic to your blog. If you want more tips to build traffic with this, read my post on How to Use and Abuse Stumbleupon
5. You can utilize #4 (above this), but use a del.icio.us bookmarking trade instead. This will build links while improving Alexa rank.

Paid Option:
Paying $20 to list your blog for sale on the Sitepoint marketplace will send thousands of Alexa users to your site, causing a massive spike in your graphs. Every website I have ever listed on Sitepoint has had a noticeable spike in the Alexa. If you really want to be evil, you can set a reserve price that is ridiculously high and not expect anyone to reach it, and you will never be obliged to sell your blog. I recommend starting your auctions bid around $50 so that tons of people flock to visit it to see if they can snatch it at a good deal.

To show you my own case study, I have included a picture with the four sites I sold on Sitepoint. As you can see, there was a large spike in traffic for all four of them. I did not own Statsync.com, but it was the site my current business partner sold back when I ran friendfrost.comhere are four of my sites that I sold on Sitepoint. (Statsync.com is also listed, as my business partner sold it on Sitepoint as well).