If you check your Website’s Alexa Ranking on a regular basis, chances are you noticed a change over the past week.

Whether your Alexa Ranking improved and you started patting yourself on the back for your SEO skills, or it weakened and left you scratching your head, you can rest assured that you (fortunately or unfortunately) most likely had little to do with it.

Thanks to the Internet marketing gurus at HubSpot, we know that the drastic change experienced by many sites occured because Alexa recently changed its algorithm.  Here are the basics:

• Rankings now include more data sources.
• Alexa has improved the methodology behind its algorithm.
• The changes provide you, the one concerned about how your Website traffic stands up on the World Wide Web, with more accurate rankings.
  

Learn more about the new Alexa Rankings straight from the source.

Not sure what we’re talking about?

Find out more about Alexa, a free online tool that ranks your Website traffic and how it compares to other sites on the Web – including those of your competitors.

Traditional PR that only targets mainstream media is a thing of the past. You now have to consider how to increase the reach and impact of your news by publishing to online distribution sites, such as PRzoom.com, PRWeb.com and PR.com.

These sites optimize the effectiveness of your press releases by distributing them to search engines and news sites, which generate links and traffic to your Website.

Getting Started

Major wire services, such as PRNewswire.com and BusinessWire.com offer online distribution as part of their packages, but there are also more affordable, and sometimes free, services available. From the endless resources of Mashable.com, comes the
"20+ Free Press Release Distribution Sites."

Eric Clemens, president of Acroment Technologies, and IT consultant extraordinaire, recently sent me a copy of The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferris.

I have to admit that I was highly skeptical of the title at first, but after devouring the book earlier this week on a trip to Vegas, I am pleased to report it has changed the way I look at success, and given me valuable insight into ways to increase the efficiency and productivity of our PR and marketing agency.

Some of the concepts are a bit far-fetched for service-based businesses like PR 20/20, but there are lessons to be learned for every professional, especially entrepreneurs.

Check out 15 of my favorite excerpts, and then grab a copy for yourself. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised:

1. “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” - Mark Twain


2. “I can’t give you a surefire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.” - Herbert Bayard Swope, American editor & journalist; first recipient of the Pulitzer Prize


3. “Having an unusually larger goal is an adrenaline infusion that provides the endurance to overcome the inevitable trials and tribulations that go along with any goal.”


4. “It is easy to get lost in minutiae, and the key to not feeling rushed is remembering that lack of time is actually lack of priorities.”


5. “The end product of a shorter deadline is almost inevitably of equal or higher quality due to greater focus.”


6. “Don’t ever arrive at the office or in front of your computer without a clear list of priorities.”


7. “If you prioritize properly, there is no need to multitask. . . . Divided attention will result in more frequent interruptions, lapses in concentration, poorer net results and less gratification.”


8. “Stop asking for opinions and start proposing solutions.”


9. “An interruption is anything that prevents the start-to-finish completion of a critical task, and there are three principal offenders: time wasters (those things that can be ignored with little or no consequence), time consumers (repetitive tasks or requests that need to be completed but often interrupt high-level work) and empowerment failures (instances where someone needs approval to make something small happened).”


10. “There is a psychological switching of gears that can require up to 45 minutes to resume a major task that has been interrupted.”


11. “For the employee, the goal is to have full access to necessary information and as much independent decision-making ability as possible. For the entrepreneur, the goal is to grant as much information and independent decision-making ability to employees or contractors as possible.”


12. “If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not working on hard enough problems. And that’s a big mistake.” - Frank Wilczek, 2004 Nobel Prize winner in physics


13. “Life is too short to waste, but it is also too long to be a pessimist or nihilist.”


14. “Surround yourself with smiling, positive people. . .”


15. [This one is my personal favorite] “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking that you have something to lose.” - Steve Jobs, Stanford University Commencement, 2005

If you aren't familiar yet with 37signals, and its founder, Jason Fried, do yourself a favor and check out this video from Crain's Chicago Business. Founded in 1999, the company designs web-based software for individuals and businesses. 37signals estimates that more than 1 million people use its products. To date, Jeff Bezos of Amazon is its only outside investor. Their products are simple and affordable, and as their Web site says, "they do everything you need and nothing you don't." Here are a few outtakes from the Crain's video, Talking Management: Leadership Lessons from Jason Fried. He offers an interesting perspective as the leader of a high-growth technology company that has become a media darling, and is sought after by investors:

• "We're not big into increasing our headcount. We're big on increasing our influence."
• "Interruption is the biggest enemy of productivity that there is."
• "We have free versions of all of our products. And that's actually the best way to get someone to pay for something."
• "We're focused on building things that provide way more value than they cost."
• "People are always willing to pay for something they find valuable."
• "I love the idea of building simple tools that work really well."
• "I don't think you need to be a big company anymore to do big things."

Corporate blogging is changing the public relations industry, and the business world, at an astonishing pace. Odds are that blogging is already impacting your business whether you know it or not.

Technorati, a leading blog search engine widely known for its quarterly State of the Blogosphere reports, is now tracking more than 70 million weblogs, and is seeing about 120,000 new weblogs being created worldwide each day. That's about 1.4 blogs created every second of every day.

This is the first of many posts to come about corporate blogging. At PR 20/20, we are constantly adapting our model and service offering to meet the growing demand from clients for blog consultation, services and resources.

Check out this excellent posting from blogger Robert Scoble for organizations looking to launch corporate blogs: The Corporate Weblog Manifesto

If you haven't considered how blogs are impacting your business, now is as good a time as any to get started!