A Useful Free Internet Marketing Tool

So many things are taken for granted, once we get to know them.

Thats right: So many valuable tips aren’t passed on, because too many of us presume others already know about them…

Well – if you know about this, great – glad you’re enjoying it too, but if not, let me introduce you to a free tool which I use uncountable times during my working day.

Its called Sparky…

This is an attachment to my browser window. It will work with IE or Firefox, whichever is your preference.

When you go to a website, there are a number of things which might strike you about it straight away: Appealing graphics, a hard-hitting headline, good/bad copy, industry logos, testimonials etc… but none of them give you a clue about how frequently the site is visited.

And don’t you think that’s important?

Put it this way: when you’re thinking of using a service, or buying a product, it helps to know how many others have used it too. We gain assurance in our purchase by knowing this. Or we realise we’re taking a risk. Either way, its worth knowing.

This is as important online as it is off. Social proof is a great way of converting sales, and its never better than when it is provided independently.

For example… if you find a site that is offering something, and claiming thousands of people have had success with it, then you should expect it to be quite a popular site, no?

So what if you could know, straight away, whether they were telling the truth or not?

Well, one of the dangers when we start out working online, is that there are many sites like that. And the only credible way of knowing how well it is visited, is by checking its Alexa rank.

The google rank helps too. That is a measure of how many other sites link to it (and what their rank is too), but that’s for another post.

Alexa is a web information company. It continuously researches every site it comes across on the Internet and monitors how frequently it is visited. Not only that, but it also gathers information about other related sites which carry a similar topic, so you can visit them too.

The Alexa toolbar, as it was, or Sparky, as they call it now, is a very cool tool for uncovering more about the webpage you’re looking at.

With it, you can not only tell how popular the site is, but also how its traffic has grown, or declined, in previous months.

The alexa rank is just that, a rank of popularity. The most visited site on the Internet (Google) has an alexa rank of 1. As I write, Facebook has a rank of 6. This means it is the 7th most visited site on The Internet. This is how it is displayed in the task bar of my browser window.

As a rule of thumb, if you can get your blog, or a site of yours, to show an alexa rank of less than 100,000 – you’re doing well: Its a good thing to aim for.

The page you’re looking at, my blog, used to have an alexa rank of around 60,000 – when I was updating it daily. Now that I do it less frequently, the rank has dropped to 280,000 or so.

Would it help you to know how well you’re doing in the traffic rankings – at a glance?

If you think so, or even if you would like to know more about any site you visit, and what other similar sites are, I strongly recommend you get this cool free tool.

The simple fact is this: If you’re marketing online, its helpful to know how your site is ranked against your competitors’. Using this tool, you can do that easily: visit both sites, and note the alexa rank of both. The one with the lower number, is visited more frequently than the other.

You can download and install Sparky on your web-browser at this link:

Hope you found this helpful. Either way, please let me know.

Have you got other tools you find useful in your day-to-day work… let me know with a comment below -

Oh, and by the way – if you don’t want me to moderate your commment, please make sure it doesn’t contain an affiliate link.