Here is a bizarre yet interesting bit of news...
According to Alexa.com (a website which tracks the popularity of every website on the planet)
Cardio Trek is in the Top 5000 websites for Toronto by popularity.
And the vast majority of those sites have nothing to do with exercise, which likely places Cardio Trek in the Top 100 Exercise websites for Toronto. Basically what it means is that for all websites everywhere, Cardio Trek is in the Top 5000 when it comes to Torontonians - and that is competing against YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, p*rn websites, etc.
I call that "successful local marketing".
Here is the actual text from Alexa:
Cardiotrek.ca is ranked #1,064,646 in the world according to the three-month Alexa traffic rankings. The site is relatively popular among users in the city of Toronto (where it is ranked #4,915). Visitors to the site spend roughly two minutes on each pageview and a total of four minutes on the site during each visit. About 68% of Cardiotrek.ca's visitors are in Canada, where it has attained a traffic rank of 20,861. Visitors to the site view an average of 2.3 unique pages per day.
So as exercise websites go Cardio Trek is becoming pretty popular - and I've only been working on it for 13 months. Initially I wasn't working on it much at all, but in September 2012 I started posting more often and it really took off in a hurry. For reference many competitor websites will have been up for years and would be jealous of the sheer number of visitors I get.
eg. I know of a rival company in Toronto that only gets 3 to 5 visitors per day (which is pathetic and shows a complete lack of advertising on their part), whereas Cardio Trek is currently clocking over 700 per day.
I chalk that down to two things:
#1. I give free exercise advice on the site. And everybody likes free advice. Including Americans, who are my 2nd biggest source of visitors and make up roughly 30% of my visitors.
#2. Before I was a personal trainer I was a SEO expert (and still am a SEO expert), which means I know how to promote things online. I still do SEO work for the real estate industry and a select number of clients. So not to brag, but I like to be good at my job.
So now I just need to set myself a higher goal and get in the Top 2500 for Toronto. Goal setting is a big part of both SEO and exercising and its good to know you can achieve it when you set out to do it. So to accomplish that I am going to make an effort to write more blog posts on the topic of exercise activities you can do in Toronto.
Making this blog I will admit does take a fair chunk of work. Finding ideas for regular blog posts, researching the topics, finding graphics or making fresh graphics... its all a lot of time sitting at the computer. But thankfully I have lots of exercise equipment in my home office so I regularly get up and exercise whilst churning out these awesome exercise oriented blog posts.
But not everyone has lots of exercise equipment (and footballs) laying around in their office so here is an amusing graphic showing a series of exercises you can do at your desk.
Update, January 8th 2013
Alexa.com has updated Cardio Trek's ranking to:
Cardiotrek.ca is ranked #974,612 in the world according to the three-month Alexa traffic rankings. The site is relatively popular among users in the city of Toronto (where it is ranked #3,449). Visitors to the site spend roughly two minutes on each pageview and a total of five minutes on the site during each visit. About 68% of Cardiotrek.ca's visitors are in Canada, where it has attained a traffic rank of 18,311. Visitors to the site view an average of 3.1 unique pages per day.
Update, January 17th 2013
Cardiotrek.ca is ranked #898,330 in the world according to the three-month Alexa traffic rankings. We estimate that 64% of visitors to the site come from Canada, where it has attained a traffic rank of 17,484, and it is relatively popular among users in the city of Toronto (where it is ranked #3,396). Visitors to Cardiotrek.ca spend roughly two minutes on each pageview and a total of five minutes on the site during each visit. About 10% of visits to the site are referred by search engines.
So already part way to that goal of 2500!
Update, January 28th 2015
So it has been two years since I have updated this post, but here is the good news:
- As of yesterday Cardiotrek.ca has surpassed 750,000 visitors.
- The website currently enjoys an average of roughly 1,450 new visitors per day. (43,697 visitors in the last 30 days.)
- In the 2014 calendar year Cardiotrek.ca had 385,952 visitors. Avrg. 32,162.67 visitors per month or 1060.31 visitors per day.
- I no longer track Cardiotrek.ca's ranking in Toronto because Alexa.com has changed what free users can see. According to Alexa the website is now more popular in the USA, likely because of several posts which have gone viral in terms of popularity.
- The top 3 most viral posts on Cardiotrek.ca are: 10 Ways to Trick Yourself into Burning Extra Calories, Nose Exercises Vs Rhinoplasty , and 20 Ways to Tighten Skin after Weight Loss
- The most popular service provided by Cardiotrek.ca is archery lessons. Archery lessons in Toronto is currently so popular that it dwarfs all of my other services combined.
