One Way To Get Traffic
7:23 pm October 31st, 2006 by Sal Cangeloso
Getting traffic is pretty easy- all you have to do is to offer people something that they cannot not get anywhere else. OK, I should have prefaced that by saying “In theory…” but you get the picture.
Proof of this can be seen in the Tarantula keyboard review that I have been talking about lately. XYZ Computing was pretty much the first site to release a comprehensive review of the product and since it’s bound to be a popular item, news of the review got picked up all over. Digg was first, but then came Engadget, Gizmodo, then sites like Shacknews, Dailytech, Hardocp (through XYZ’s news), and a bunch more. The postings were not always that prominent, it is just a keyboard review, but the site’s traffic definitely shows that having something first, whether its a review, or news, or anything else, is more important than going on for 17 pages of testing or having 150 hi-res shots (at least from a profitability standpoint). It also helps when whatever you are writing about is popular or highly awaited, like Razer’s first keyboard, but it ishould be obvious that the scale of the response is proportional to how big the news is.
It is interesting to see how many clicks come from certain sites relative to their size. For example, Digg is huge, but a lot of people actually come from Digg to the articles on its front page. Most blogs, on the other hand, post a blurb and say what needs to be said, end of story. This is not anyone’s fault- people visit those blogs because they want to hear what the editors have to say. After reading the blurb there is a good chance they have all the information they want and will just move on to the next entry or keep hitting refresh until there is another post. I guess it is just a difference in the readers, but it is interesting to see it play out in real-time.
