Tech Smith created Camtasia Studio. When I upgraded to Camtasia Studio 5 I payed an extra $8 to have a physical copy of the software shipped to me. Inside the box were some promotional materials and the Jing Project was one of them. I’ve only spent a few minutes with it but it has some interesting possibilities.
First of all it’s a free download. It’s similar to Camtasia Studio but without much of the functionality. It’s very easy to use. You can create either an image or a video. Then you can instantly upload the image or video. You can upload to screencast.com or to your own server. Sounds a lot like a poor man’s Camtasia Studio at this point, doesn’t it?
What caught my eye was Flickr. Flickr is owned by Yahoo. It’s a PR9 site with an Alexa rank of 32 so it gets a ton of traffic. Jing provides a simple way to upload images and videos to Flickr at the click of a button…and if what you upload to Flickr is interesting you should be able to divert some eyeballs from Flickr to your site.
2) Drive More Free Traffic to Your Blog
James Alenteal has just released a new course where he reveals a simple method he’s been using to drive free traffic to his blog. He’s allowed a few beta testers to to test the system and they’re giving it rave reviews. This traffic tactic blends SEO & copywriting techniques. And of course there’s a 48 Hour Special that expires Saturday morning.
Tags: Monetization, Create Your Own Products
Popularity: 35% [?]
2 Comments
Robert, your post brings up a question maybe you can do another post about, but I’ve yet to have anyone give a substantive answer.
The only people I ever hear talk about “Alexa rankings” are the Internet marketing crowd.
Alexa’s own site says they get their rankings from the use of their toolbar. Problem is, in all the years I’ve been heavily on the Internet with over 200,000 readers coming and going, hardly anyone I’ve ever unofficially polled has even heard of Alexa, especially since the Google toolbar came on the scene. After a decade of being online myself, and being pretty educated about ongoing Internet technology, I had never heard of Alexa until I started reading about it on Internet marketing sites.
One prominent marketer we all know and “love”, claims that if you aren’t in the top 100,000 on Alexa, you’re a “nobody”. The only real reason I can ascertain he makes this claim, is simply because HE IS. His mailing list is not that big, and traffic numbers are average.
Knowing that many marketers initiate an effort to artificially raise their Alexa ranking, in reality what good is it really?
I know it helps marketers say “look how popular my site is, I must know what I’m doing” but in reality, is it really an authentic indicator, or just marketing smoke and mirrors?
My suspicions seem to be verified when I look at some of the sites of “internet marketing clones” who have a high Alexa ranking (in the top 100,000) but whose site is terrible: poor content, crappy or no products, just sloppy “clones” following a “guru”.
What am I missing? Why is Alexa so prominent to online marketers, but not in the real world or the rest of the business online community? Is this a case of the blind leading the blind? Or my ignorance?
I’ll be the first to jump on board if I’m just unenlightened… but so far, I’ve not been able to find any real substance about this whole Alexa ranking thing…
I followed up a little on my own question and found that my site, http://www.seriousfaith.com, which gets over 1000 visitors daily for several years, is ranked over 2 million on Alexa. My blog, which has been up for about 5 months and gets about 300 unique visitors a day, is ranked 1.4 million. How does that make any sense? What good is Alexa if the site traffic I have facts on, isn’t even CLOSE to being accurately reflected in Alexa? Just wondering is someone would help me understand why Alexa is touted as some measure of greatness in the Internet world, when it appears to be inaccurate and somewhat easily manipulated…. Any thoughts? BR
[Brent,
I don't know the answer to your question. I've often wondered the same thing though. For several months when I look at the weekly Alexa rank of my blog it's somewhere in the 50K - 70K range but my Alex rank currently shows about 96K. Both of those figures can't be correct.
Google's PR is a mystery too. This site was PR3 before the last update. Despite more links and more traffic, it dropped to PR2. It doesn't make much sense.
Personally I have neither the Alexa or Google toolbars installed and I don't obsess about PR & Alexa rank. I watch it but the thing that matters more is actual traffic not some perhaps arbitrary number assigned by a third party.
Robert]
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