I moved my blog hosting from New Zealand to the USA because it makes sense to host my blogs in the USA as I’m keen to connect with readers in North America.

According to Google Analytics I’m on target with that because 50% of my readers are in North America (hooray!) so hopefully hosting it there will help make the site download even faster for them. Not that I’ve had any complaints about slow download times, but it’s something I want to make sure is as fast as possible.

I’ll use my other blog Get In the Hot Spot ^[1] as a case study here. It has readers in an amazing 162 countries and after the USA and Canada my readers are concentrated mainly in Australia, the UK and New Zealand which is brilliant. I’m not sure if it’s a coincidence that I’ve lived in all these places (I’ve lived in then USA too – Connecticut and Georgia) or just the natural order of things because my blog’s in english and these are all english-speaking countries.

I’m also hoping hosting my blog in the USA might also help my Google search engine ranking and my Alexa ranking.

Alexa Who?

I registered my blog with Alexa about 6 months ago because I heard advertisers use the Alexa ranking as an indication of how well read a blog is. I don’t have any ads on my blog now but I might go down that track in the future so I thought I’d sign up with Alexa. It’s an interesting experiment and my Alexa ranking has increased since I registered my blog with them.

In case you don’t know, Alexa ranking is in numerical order so the site with a global Alexa ranking of 1 should be the most visited site in the world, and a site with an Alexa ranking of 4 for the USA should be the 4th most popular website in the USA. According to Alex the top three sites globally today are Google, Facebook and YouTube in t that order.

While my humble blog hasn’t reached those lofty heights it is rising throught the Alexa ranks as you can see from these statistics:

7 April 2010
Global: 167,917
United States: 59,382
Australia: 4,741

9 July 2010
Global: 80,945
United States: 45,042
Australia: 4,331

It’s interesting to chart this progress but the other thing I love about Alexa is that I can install their tool bar at the bottom of my browser (I use Firefox) and quickly get a good indication of how popular a blog or website is. This is useful when I’m working out blogs to guest post on ^[2]. The Alexa traffic stats and page views gives me a good indication of how well visited a blog is compared to my own.

If you go to the Alexa ^[3] site you can either download the tool bar for quick reference whenever you come to a new site or use the site info area to put in a website address and see how it fares. Not all sites have information for them which could be because they haven’t been registered  with Alexa, but always makes me think they must be quite sparsely visited and not much use for guest posting purposes where high traffic blogs are better.

I Love Women

Not in the biblical sense but I think it’s time to confess I do aim to have a strong female readership here which is what I want. Of course, all you lovely males are more than welcome to join us ladies, but I’d like Get In the Hot Spot to be a place where women have a strong voice and presence and it looks as if I’m succeeding with this goal. There are still many more men in business and blogging than women, and I’d like to think my tips here will help balance out those numbers.

According to MailChimp ^[4] who I use for my email newsletter, and judging purely on a first name basis, 54% of the last 85 people to subscribe to this blog by email were female – hello Traci, Shanna, Layla, Bev, Tammy and co, it’s great to have you on the team.

Alexa ^[5] also has an “audience snapshot” which give you some idea of who’s reading your blog. For example, Alexa tells me:

“based on internet averages, successfulblogging.com is visited more frequently by females who are in the age range 18-24, have no children and browse this site from home.”

I’m not sure how accurate this information is but it’s interesting to read things like:

“Relative to the general internet population, people who went to graduate school are over-represented at successfulblogging.com.”

As they say, it is only a snapshot but, based on my interpretation, what Alexa is saying is that Get In the Hot Spot readers seem to be a smart group of women and men who read this blog at home and are aged 55 and under, and that sounds sensational to me. You’re all very welcome here no matter what age, gender, shape or color you are.

Thank You For Reading

If you’re new here make yourself at home and check out some more articles ^[6]. I hope you like what you see and will take a moment to subscribe to Get In the Hot Spot. It’s a brilliant way to stay motivated and inspired plus it’s totally free. Subscribe now by email ^[7] or to choose the RSS Feed ^[8] for updates in your feed reader.

If you like my blog don’t forget to spread the word by emailing, Tweeting or liking or sharing it on Facebook because that helps me connect with new readers and stay motivated to keep writing. You can use the little buttons below to make it easier for you. Thank you, my readership is growing thanks to you and I really appreciate your help.

Photo credit: Melissa Brandts