http://www.howtostartaclothingcompany.com/ wrote this last night. Anything else I should add? So I've run into a lot of people talking the talk, gloating about how well their company is doing, or trying to get me involved with their project. If I don't know you I will be skeptical and look at a few things that will let me know if you are full of shit : ) Alexa Ranking Go to www.alexa.com and pull up their site. I've run a bunch of different sites so I know how much traffic a site is getting compared to what their alexa ranking is. For example the ranking of this site is 235,304. I get 18k in visitors every month. Around 1-2 million in ranking will be a thousand to a couple thousand hits. Also look at the traffic Rank for 7 day and 1 month. If they are just starting out it takes a while for their three month average to go up but they could be getting amazing traffic right now. Page Rank Google uses it to tell how much value to place on your site and I use it the same way. Page rank is calculated by google and gives you a rating from 0-10 depending on how many link backs you have. So if you have a 2 or below I know you aren't linked from a lot of websites. This really gets me a good overview on how well a company is doing. Sometimes they run on subdomains, like if they have a bigcartel store, and alexa just calculates the ranking for bigcartel.com and not the actual store. By the way, you can have your own domain on bigcartel by using cnames. So now you are equipt with a bullshit detector, use it wisely. 2009-10-07T04:32:42-04:00 22 2009-09-25T15:38:15-04:00 true 0 81371 false false 506 1219 1 2009-11-21T14:33:53-05:00 764 You make good points in terms of online presence but you can't discount what people are selling in other distributions channels. You may be 100% correct but if people sell through various retailers, at live events, etc. they may not be 100% BSing 81371 Post 2009-09-25T15:58:55-04:00 2622291 9002 2009-09-25T15:58:55-04:00 How does one find the google page rank of a site? 81371 Post 2009-09-25T16:07:39-04:00 2622481 7859 2009-09-25T16:07:39-04:00 <blockquote><cite>Oo Lori oO said:</cite> You make good points in terms of online presence but you can't discount what people are selling in other distributions channels. You may be 100% correct but if people sell through various retailers, at live events, etc. they may not be 100% BSing</blockquote> I have heard other clothing companies talking specifically about their online sales. Unless they have some ridiculous conversion rating the numbers they are saying are not accurate. Also it gives me a good idea on who to trust for advice. Do I listen to the Tim Toomey, David from Seibei, Eric from Linty Fresh, Ben from Fright Rags. Yes I do, they all know what they are talking about and their alexa rankings are low I don't listen to advice from people on online matters from people that have high alexa numbers. 81371 Post 2009-09-25T16:08:47-04:00 2622541 1219 2009-09-25T16:12:31-04:00 <blockquote><cite>gumbolimbo said:</cite> How does one find the google page rank of a site?</blockquote> you can get a pagerank plugin for firefox which will automatically pull up the pages pagerank. 81371 Post 2009-09-25T16:13:19-04:00 2622631 1219 2009-09-25T16:13:19-04:00 how current is Alexa 81371 Post 2009-09-25T16:16:02-04:00 2622711 2186 2009-09-25T16:16:02-04:00 Oh ok so you mean this solely pertains to ONLINE sales. If so, I can see the correlation but I personally wouldn't throw all my weight behind it...if I recall I thought someone once posted about the inaccuracies of Alexa rankings? Even on the Alexa website it says things like "Our users are disproportionately likely to visit alexa.com, amazon.com and archive.org, and traffic to these sites may be substantially overcounted. The Alexa Toolbar works only with the Internet Explorer browser. Sites frequented mainly by users of other browsers will be undercounted. For example, the AOL/Netscape browser is not supported, which means that Alexa collects little data from AOL users, and our traffic to aol.com is likely lower than it would be for a more representative sample. The Alexa Toolbar works only on Windows operating systems. Although a large majority of the Internet population currently use Windows, traffic to any sites which are disproportionately visited by users of other operating systems will be undercounted." ...among other things I mean you're right if someone says "I sold X shirts through my BC" and their numbers dont correlate to this...I just don't think these rankings are a true depiction of how well a company is doing...its more like just one factor among many. 81371 Post 2009-09-25T16:16:09-04:00 2622721 9002 2009-09-25T16:17:21-04:00 do the alexa for rethink clothing. It doesnt even list half of the sites that link to me. It says germany is my second biggest market, which is wrong since I know from analytics its close between U.K, Aussie and Canada 81371 Post 2009-09-25T16:40:59-04:00 2622951 2186 2009-09-25T16:40:59-04:00 I have the Alexa firefox plugin so I can see these stats all the time. Kind of cool 81371 Post 2009-09-25T16:53:44-04:00 2623041 2430 2009-09-25T16:53:44-04:00 I think hes using this as a snapshot when someone says they have 70 sales a month or 20,000 unique visitors, he can basically check at Alexa and verify what they say. I checked mine a while ago and now know I need to get more crap on the net! 81371 Post 2009-09-25T17:14:28-04:00 2623201 5341 2009-09-25T17:15:05-04:00 <blockquote><cite>Integral said:</cite> I think hes using this as a snapshot when someone says they have 70 sales a month or 20,000 unique visitors, he can basically check at Alexa and verify what they say. I checked mine a while ago and now know I need to get more crap on the net!</blockquote> Yah you/he's right...you can use these as ballpark-ers to immediately disprove someone who says that. I kind of was just making the point that this is but one (yet not 100% accurate) element of the entire picture. 81371 Post 2009-09-25T17:25:06-04:00 2623321 9002 2009-09-25T17:25:25-04:00 It is not entirely accurate but it gives you a good indicator of how much traffic a site gets. It takes a sample and uses that to calculate your ranking. "I just don’t think these rankings are a true depiction of how well a company is doing...its more like just one factor among many." Alexa calculates your traffic ranking, your traffic is what gets you sales, more traffic means more sales. You can argue all you want but this is the best way to calculate the traffic ranking of a site. Are going to throw out all the data because it isn't 100% accurate. Take it with a grain of salt and use the data the best you can. 81371 Post 2009-09-25T17:29:22-04:00 2623351 1219 2009-09-25T17:29:22-04:00 <blockquote><cite>Truman325i said:</cite> how current is Alexa</blockquote> It can give you your ranking for the past 7 days, 1 month, or 3 month average 81371 Post 2009-09-25T17:30:21-04:00 2623361 1219 2009-09-25T17:30:21-04:00 I like tools like this to get a baseline/good idea of how my performance is increasing vs. comparable sites. 81371 Post 2009-09-25T17:38:28-04:00 2623431 2186 2009-09-25T17:38:28-04:00 Yeah, definitely take Alexa with a grain of salt. I don't necessarily think it's an indicator of someone that's doing well in terms of sales. For example, siebei.com has an alexa rank of 739,430 with 127 incoming links and rethinkclothing.com has an alexa rank of 883,721 with 17 incoming links. Hmmm, not much of a difference in terms of rank but take a look at incoming links. Seibei's link is relatively low and yet he has been able to quit his job and focus on Seibei. Knowing that someone quit their job and is able to feed themselves strictly from T-Shirt sales seems to be a better indicator of "doing well" than an alexa rank. Plus, let's not discount good SEO. If you've got good SEO then you'll definitely do much better on Alexa and Google pagerank than someone who doesn't have SEO optimized site. At the end of the day, it's the content that sells. Pump out constantly good content and the traffic will come. You might have good SEO and thus a good amount of search engine robots visiting your site. Doesn't mean you're necessarily doing well in terms of sales. I rather have a solid 300 real people reading and using my content than 10,000 search robots scouring my site. For what it's worth, my Alexa rank is 213,729. 81371 Post 2009-09-25T17:46:41-04:00 2623481 7038 2009-09-25T17:49:05-04:00 <blockquote><cite>Coty said:</cite> Yeah, definitely take Alexa with a grain of salt. I don't necessarily think it's an indicator of someone that's doing well in terms of sales. For example, siebei.com has an alexa rank of 739,430 with 127 incoming links and rethinkclothing.com has an alexa rank of 883,721 with 17 incoming links. Hmmm, not much of a difference in terms of rank but take a look at incoming links. Seibei's link is relatively low and yet he has been able to quit his job and focus on Seibei. Knowing that someone quit their job and is able to feed themselves strictly from T-Shirt sales seems to be a better indicator of "doing well" than an alexa rank. Plus, let's not discount good SEO. If you've got good SEO then you'll definitely do much better on Alexa and Google pagerank than someone who doesn't have SEO optimized site. At the end of the day, it's the content that sells. Pump out constantly good content and the traffic will come. You might have good SEO and thus a good amount of search engine robots visiting your site. Doesn't mean you're necessarily doing well in terms of sales. I rather have a solid 300 real people reading and using my content than 10,000 search robots scouring my site. For what it's worth, my Alexa rank is 213,729.</blockquote> Its funny i only have 17 sites linking to me. I think I have over 17 just linking to me for my otter-tude shirt...lol 81371 Post 2009-09-25T18:06:24-04:00 2623641 2186 2009-09-25T18:06:24-04:00 nice, 0.2% of people going to bigcartel visit my site, ha. is a high number real bad or a low number? 81371 Post 2009-09-25T18:06:37-04:00 2623661 1271 2009-09-25T18:06:37-04:00 <blockquote><cite>Truman325i said:</cite> <blockquote><cite>Coty said:</cite> Yeah, definitely take Alexa with a grain of salt. I don't necessarily think it's an indicator of someone that's doing well in terms of sales. For example, siebei.com has an alexa rank of 739,430 with 127 incoming links and rethinkclothing.com has an alexa rank of 883,721 with 17 incoming links. Hmmm, not much of a difference in terms of rank but take a look at incoming links. Seibei's link is relatively low and yet he has been able to quit his job and focus on Seibei. Knowing that someone quit their job and is able to feed themselves strictly from T-Shirt sales seems to be a better indicator of "doing well" than an alexa rank. Plus, let's not discount good SEO. If you've got good SEO then you'll definitely do much better on Alexa and Google pagerank than someone who doesn't have SEO optimized site. At the end of the day, it's the content that sells. Pump out constantly good content and the traffic will come. You might have good SEO and thus a good amount of search engine robots visiting your site. Doesn't mean you're necessarily doing well in terms of sales. I rather have a solid 300 real people reading and using my content than 10,000 search robots scouring my site. For what it's worth, my Alexa rank is 213,729.</blockquote> Its funny i only have 17 sites linking to me. I think I have over 17 just linking to me for my otter-tude shirt...lol</blockquote> Exactly, inaccuracies like that make me skeptical of the ranking in general. As long as the content is good I will continue to visit the site. 81371 Post 2009-09-25T18:41:49-04:00 2624061 7038 2009-09-25T18:41:49-04:00 I come from a marketing background and I also like to use Marketleap and Quantcast. Marketleap is similar to PageRank. Quantcast breaks down the demographics for the higher ranked sites. 81371 Post 2009-09-25T19:53:25-04:00 2624601 673 2009-09-25T19:53:25-04:00 compete.com is also a very good indication as well. 81371 Post 2009-09-25T21:33:47-04:00 2625421 5929 2009-09-25T21:33:47-04:00 you can also make a google analytics account if you're interested in your site's traffic information. You also probably have webstats configured through your hosting plan (If you have one, that is... typically yourdomain.com/webstats). If you want REALLLY accurate numbers you could set up a mint account. Here's an example for sonspring.com: http://mint.sonspring.com I trust Quantcast over Alexa. Also, links from bit.url, tinyurl, mslinks, etc. often get lost in the shuffle with regard to link backs. 81371 Post 2009-09-26T12:34:50-04:00 2630791 68591 2009-09-26T12:34:50-04:00 you can also make a google analytics account if you're interested in your site's traffic information. You also probably have webstats configured through your hosting plan (If you have one, that is... typically yourdomain.com/webstats). If you want REALLLY accurate numbers you could set up a mint account. Here's an example for sonspring.com: http://mint.sonspring.com I trust Quantcast over Alexa. Also, links from bit.url, tinyurl, mslinks, etc. often get lost in the shuffle with regard to link backs. 81371 Post 2009-09-26T12:44:43-04:00 2630851 68591 2009-09-26T12:44:43-04:00 <a href="http://www.socialmention.com/">social mention</a> I thought some of you analytical types might get a kick out of this. 81371 Post 2009-10-07T04:32:39-04:00 2766791 506 2009-10-07T04:32:39-04:00