A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing
Posted On: 2007-08-27
Sometimes the clueless level of some people astounds me. It's as if they live in some kind of vacuum and do business here on the Net by remote control and never come close enough to hear the pulse and listen to the background noise. How they ever hope to achieve success is beyond me.
But then there are those who try to do business here with only a vague idea of what it takes to make money on the Net. Perhaps they read one or two threads on a Webmaster board that is inhabited by wannabe legends and gurus and suddenly they know it all ... or so they think.
I was wandering around a mainstream affiliate and merchant board today when I came across one of most incredible examples of a one of the latter types of merchant I have ever seen. Now you would think that if a merchant was going to take his business online he would want to spend a little time coming to grips with the vagaries of selling stuff online.
You would also think that he or she would want to spend at least some time in learning some of the basics that most Webmasters need to know. And to do that you might think that he or she might spend some time checking various boards and sites around the Net to get a feel for how things work. After all, there is an investment in time and money that every merchant makes when he takes his business online and there's even more of an investment in time and money when he decides to open his business up to affiliates.
If you're going to put time and money into something then you really would want to spend some time learning how it worked ... wouldn't you? Well I certainly would but then perhaps I'm strange ... perhaps the best way to do business is to jump in completely blind and blunder through the best you can.
Perhaps it's those people who subscribe to the notion that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing who might succeed because sometimes it seems better to have no knowledge at all rather than having just enough to be dangerous. You know, that could actually be the way to success because, if you were totally clueless, you wouldn't even know about Alexa so you wouldn't make the same mistake this merchant did.
An affiliate of his hit the board and started a discussion about an email he had received from this merchant. He was astounded to receive an email telling him that he had been removed from the merchant's program because both his Alexa rating and his Google page rank was too low.
Now I'm sure you would probably be astounded if you got a message like that ... but then again perhaps you wouldn't be ... perhaps you'd be too busy falling about laughing to be astounded. But this affiliate was astounded ... and so were a number of other affiliates who commented on the email and joined in the all-round trashing of the merchant.
Now if you were the merchant who had made a giant gaff like that what would you do? Would you quietly learn from your mistake and reinstate the affiliate or would you try and defend your position?
Well the best thing that some merchants could do in a situation like this is to say nothing ... but not this guy. Just when things had begun to calm down he hit the board and defended what he had done because, in his words 'Actually Alexa rating gives a good picture of the traffic to the site. It really does.'
Sometimes people just don't know when to keep their mouths shut and take the ridicule that's been heaped on them.
And just in case you're one of those who thinks that Alexa rankings are worth anything these days I should point you to a Tech Crunch post that appeared back on August 13. Someone had discovered that Alexa was suggesting that YouTube was now getting more traffic than Google.
It seems that the reality is a long way off what Alexa thinks. Comscore reports the real figures at something close to 100 billion page views every month for Google while YouTube is getting a mere 16 billion page views a month.
Anyone who has been around for a while knows that Alexa's figures have always been rubbery and reliant on people who have the Alexa toolbar installed and to base important business decisions on it is less than wise but obviously people are still doing it.
I have to admit that there are times when I've used Alexa rankings as a vague indicator for a client but that's about all Alexa's figures are good for. They're certainly not accurate and they're not something that anyone should use as a measure of the worth of an affiliate.