Alexa.com has made a business out of providing metrics to the marketplace on various sites.  Alexa’s data is aggregated from several sources, one of which is (I believe) the alexa toolbar.

The Alexa ranking of a site, is the ranking of a site’s popularity among all web surfers.

As you can see from the above link, Google.com is #1 (duh)

What’s kind of cool, is that you can individual searches for sites like corporateraiter.com on the site by doing a search.  For CorporateRaiter’s alexa.com rank you can go here CorporateRaiter Alexa Rank

Madness!

According to alexa.com corporate raiter is among the top 300k sites WORLDWIDE.  And, ranked 82,977 in the US.

C’mon.

There have to be at least 83,000 porn sites that are more popular than Corporate Raiter.

In fact, I have some blogs on other topics that get more traffic that haven’t even broken the top 1MM on Alexa’s rating scale.  While I’m not complaining, I wanted to point this out since I mentioned it as one of the criteria that I would be tracking as part of my dofollow experiment.

On that measure I would have to say that the dofollow experiment was a smashing success.

As far as PageRank goes (a criminally lagging indicator) I had much better results on some subpages of mine using another technique.  I’m going to do some more experimenting to see if I can narrow down the specific reason that this “other” technique had so much success in getting pagerank *quickly*.  One of my posts actually has a pagerank of 4, and another has a pagerank of 3.

Let me know what you think about the alexa algorithm and your experiences with it?

Is Alexa worthwhile at all, or just a tool to dupe unsuspecting newbs in the Internet space?

Sound off.  Leave a comment.  It’s dofollow.

The allure of working with other start up companies is undeniable. As struggling entrepreneurs, you are ‘brothers in arms’. They are eager to prove themselves and more likely to work with you and be flexible. Simply put, they just ‘try harder’.

Why Shouldn’t Start Ups Work with Other Start Ups?

Simply put: Start ups fail.

While this statement should not come as a revelation to anyone — least of whom, anyone with any entrepreneurial experience, I’d like to walk through a through experiment with you to drive this home and help you internalize this concept.

For this exercise I’m going to borrow a formula I first became familiar with while doing online marketing for the sports book industry in the 90’s. Please bear with me for a moment while I explain.

The Parlay Formula

One of the biggest moneymakers in sports booking is the ‘parlay’. To win a parlay (often 3, 5, or even 10 team parlay), the bettor must correctly wager on the winning team 3, 5 or x number of games.

In any given contest the sports book looks to even the betting on both sides (and thus maximize the chances of getting the ‘juice’ or ‘vig’ for the entire book). That said, roughly, by throwing darts at a board you will have close to a 50/50 chance of winning on a sports bet. Expressed as a decimal, that is .50.

Bettors are attracted to the parlay because a winner will be paid better than in x number of separate standard wagers. For example, a 3 team parlay will typically pay 5 for every 1 wagered.

Why the Parlay is a Sucker’s Bet

While every bettor figures they can choose the winner of three games and thus win 5x their wager, the fact of the matter is that most don’t understand the math of probabilities working behind the scenes.

To accurately calculate the chances of a parlay bet coming in you have to take the probability of any individual bet being wagered correctly: .5

Then, take the probability to the power of the number of consecutive bets which must pay off…. In the case of a three team parlay, this is 3.

So, to calculate our odds, we calculate:

.5^3 or .125.

If we express this another way, that is a 1 in 8 chance to win 5x.

If we add just one more game to the mix, the chances for success drop to .0625 or 1 in 16

What Do Sports Book Odds Have to Do with Start Ups?

Each and every variable you place in your critical path to success increases your odds of failure exponentially. Literally.

Start ups, meanwhile, have a much higher failure rate in general. So, placing young companies anywhere in your critical path accelerate the exponential formula’s decline towards zero.

By way of example, if we are ‘betting’ on three outcomes each with a 30% probability of success, the predictive formula looks like the following:

.30^3 = .027.

Or, expressed another way, three things that have to work out that each have a 30% chance of succeeding give your project a 2.7% chance of success.

That’s the definition of ‘long odds’

Lessons from Your Bookie

Like any good bookie would teach you, you increase your probability of success in two ways.

1.) decrease the number of successful outcomes necessary for overall success of your project
2.) ensure each critical factor which defines your success is as close to a ’sure thing’ as possible

I hope this article was able to provide you some food for thought. If you have any comments or questions, go ahead and drop me a note. It’s a dofollow link for anyone with relevant commentary.

It refers to the difficulty of charging services after they have already been rendered.

Call girls, of course, have found a way to deal with this problem — and that is to always get paid up front.

Think about this for a minute: if you tell me that you desperately want to double the size of your business, and i tell you that I can help you — for a cost — as long as that cost is ‘reasonably’ less than they perceived benefit you receive by doubling your business you are probably interested.

Now, if the grand sum of my work is 15 minutes of tweaking your site, many people will begrudge the consultant his fair share of the proceeds.

Even funnier, is that almost no one will admit that they would feel this way. However, it’s part of human nature that they don’t see the 10 years of experience that gave someone the knowledge to know WHAT to tweak. They only see the 10 minutes of work and think: “gosh, someone else could have done that just as easily and charged a LOT less”. Nevermind, that 9 out of 10 professionals wouldn’t have known what to do and would have worked for months with less to show in results.

The mark of the true professional is someone who can cut through the clutter, simplify, and not be focused on trying to make simple concepts complicated. Unfortunately, these are also the same behaviours that will make you susceptible to the prostitute principle.

Oh, but wait, I know….all my readers are more evolved and would never do that, right?

Sound off. Leave a comment. It’s a follow link for your site after all.