In the Race to Rank series I reported last week that my Alexa rank was at 168,322.

My goal is to reach 100,000 by April 2008. At the rate I have watched my Alexa rank decrease (remember, lower is better), I figured that this type of goal was not only obtainable but I could easily do better.

Using the Sparky add-on for Firefox, when I visit my sites on a daily basis I watch to see how rank is improving or declining. This is vital information for me to know on all of my sites. Losing traffic and rank for me means I’m losing business. This isn’t good so I heavily monitor what’s happening with rank on all my sites.

Today, as I logged into my dashboard to see the comments left over night I noticed that my rank with Alexa has changed. More specifically today’s Alexa rank is 155,708.

Quick math tells you that in just 5 days, my Alexa rank has dropped by 12,614.

Logic says, what happened? We’ve got to repeat what happened on my blog in the last 5 days to reach the 100,000 goal by April. And continuing the same steps, how can I drop to 90,000 or maybe even lower?

The best way for me to sum up what has happened in the last 5 days is to give you just one word:

Stumble

Yes, that’s right. StumbleUpon brought so many visitors in the last 5 days with two different blog posts. This is the only thing out of the ordinary for I’m Blogging That.

To get specific, the post Race for Rank was stumbled several times which brought 617 visitors to my site directly from StumbleUpon.

My Entrecard contest post brought in 351 visitors from StumbleUpon.

If you’re keeping track, this means that in two days I’m Blogging That had 968 visitors from StumbleUpon and that’s not counting residual traffic for either post on the same or different days.

The lesson learned is to write posts which will help you bring in traffic. You knew this, didn’t you? I mean, how many times exactly have we, as bloggers, heard Content is King.  Aren’t you sick of it at this point?

However, the truth remains that while the saying sucks, it’s absolutely true. If your posts are on topics that people actually care about and you do the networking required to promote such posts, you’ll have traffic. Traffic is links, better Alexa rank, and in the long run, a better blog community.

When it comes to the topics on I’m Blogging That, what do people care about? Rank, apparently. The last time I had a huge StumbleUpon traffic (excluding the last 5 days) is when I announced that Google performed a PageRank update. A simple, simple post that explained I knew there was an update because I had pages on my blog, previously not ranked, showing PageRank.

This very simple post brought in 886 visitors from StumbleUpon.

Here’s the lesson of this post:

Pay attention to your ranks, know what they are if you want to make them better. Knowing where you’re at, what your ranking average is, and where you want to be will give you an idea of how to properly promote and network your blogs.

Next, make sure you have something that’s going to report real time statistics for your site. For example, I use and monitor daily my stats with the WordPress.com stats plugin. This has been vital to me. It’s a great plugin that techie turned me on to at PostieCon.

I find it important to monitor my stats like this in real time because it lets me know where to spend time networking that day. It means if I’m getting heavy traffic from StumbleUpon, I need to head over to the site and spend time networking. It brings in more visitors. And the truth is, if you’re just getting a few visits from StumbleUpon, you can head over there and network to bring in more.

It doesn’t matter where your numbers are at, but on a day when you’re receiving a great deal of hits from one source, spend your time networking that day at that source.

In the end, I have proof now that having posts stumbled will indeed help me to lower my Alexa ranking.