Traffic Stats the A List Will Never Tell You

I'm sure many of you are longing for the day when you have an RSS following in the thousands and an Alexa Ranking in the Top 10,000. Fess up...

You are impressed by stuff like that - High PR, Massive Twitter Following, all the little signs of "wow this site must be successful" and "I bet they are making money". (Success and making money do not necessarily go hand in hand.)

To that end I just thought some of you would like to know some real numbers.

Allyn Hane had mentioned in his comments on Blogger Illustrated that he was kinda shocked that Chris Brogan got so few comments on his posts in spite of 45K RSS readers. The same applies to Darren Rowse 165K or Brian Clark at CopyBlogger 105K and so on with the A list.

The thing most people don't realize is that most of those RSS numbers are grossly inflated with the numbers added by Aweber Sign Ups. Download a free report or buy one of their books and you end up in the RSS number. The numbers are in no way reflective of how many people actually sign up for just reading the post feeds.

Hence don't assume you are going to get a flood of traffic by Guest posting or racing to get a fanboy comment first in queue on one of these sites. The fact is only a very small percentage of readers ever bother to read the daily feed update, even less click over to the site in question and most readers just delete the notification in the email alert. This is reflected in just how few comments these large blogs get in relation to their "perceived" reach and influence.

Between the 3 sites they have 300K readers... and yet they manage only a 1000 members for the Problogger.com forum. A couple thousand (or so I've seen mentioned) for the Third Tribe Marketing thing/forum. Not really a whole lot of clout when you think about it. Those they do influence tend to be the same small group of fans that fawn over them on their sites while the rest of their readers have largely ignored their call to open their wallets.

I used to wonder just how much traffic do you need to breathe the rarefied air among Alexa's Top 10k sites.

Well I have broken into it from time to time - most recently the other day, and the first time I did months ago I remember thinking how far off I had been regarding just how much traffic was necessary.

Click to enlarge images.

In fact the real numbers will probably surprise a lot of you.

Here is another shot of my site compared to the "Big Guys" taken today and you'll notice that I topped Brogan's site for a day or two.

Wanna' know how much traffic he has?

Keep in mind that I'm talking averages and not absolutes. How well Alexa tracks and quantifies search traffic (they are getting better btw.) as compared to toolbar/social traffic could skew things. ie. maybe you rank better with much less traffic if it is heavily toolbar/social or maybe the same applies to search and not so much to the toolbar. Never the less, for our purposes I just thought some of you might be interested in some raw numbers...

But not until I hear your guesses...

Leave a comment and tell me how much traffic you think a site needs to sit 7k on Alexa.

I'll tell you the answer after the comments

Cheers,