Apr 09
3

How quickly does your news spread?

Posted by Eric Pratum
Published in Viral Marketing

Being able to call yourself a blogger is great. It does not matter whether you post many times each day like Chris Brogan or if you post every few months like the folks over at Where is Bob?

When you do post though, how do people find your posts? Even if you are a personal blogger like Paolo Jr, you at least have a small group of dedicated readers… be it your immediate family, circle of friends, or Second Life buddies. But, how do new people find your posts?

In your blog design, you need to make it very clear how people can subscribe. Look at the big RSS button with “subscribe” next to it there on the right. You could be doing that. I have to like your site a lot in order to check back frequently without simply using a subscription option to tell me when something new has been posted. If people are not subscribed to your blog, it is easy for them to forget about it and stop checking in.

Now that you have subscriptions displayed prominently, you need a better way to bring in new readers than simply just waiting for the search engines to crawl your new material and then hoping that someone’s search brings them to your site. If you are on Twitter, and you should be if you are a blogger, you need to tweet links to your most recent posts. If there is anything Twitter is good for, it is spreading news quickly. If you have 500 followers, 50 that click on your link, and 1 or 2 (also with 500 followers each) that retweet your link, how many people do you think you can get reading your new blog posts?

Sadly, I see too few bloggers who take advantage of news aggregators like Reddit, Digg, Sphinn, Mixx, Stumble Upon, etc. This is seriously how often some people check these sites for new things to read. My personal favorite is Reddit, but that is because I like the stripped down UI, the customization options when it comes to topics, and the general vibe of the community. Digg is the big dog in the arena though and should not be overlooked even if it is impossible to get to the front page.

Ideally when you post something new, your readers will submit you to news aggregating sites because your post was just that great! Why not help them out and include buttons for them to do so… like the Sphinn button at the bottom of this post or the set of buttons on Self-Promotion for Smart People.

Regardless of whether readers would submit new posts to news aggregators or not, I usually beat them to the punch, making it even easier for them when they come to read the post because they only need to vote it up or down. A solidly formulated title and a good post can easily explode your daily visits and pageviews by 2000% of your average. I have had it happen. You can too.

Let’s say that you average 100 visits/day, but you rework your design to display subscription options and news aggregation buttons, and then, you use Twitter to get 1000 extra people to visit your new post and Reddit to get another 2000. If only 1% of those new visitors subscribe and you formulate compelling titles and great posts once each week, you can see how you can quickly get your news spread around.

So, how quickly does your news spread?