My latest post was about an interesting series of experiments that I did in order to study some journalistic approaches to promote blog posts at www.dzone.com. Just a quick recap here, the principles were the following, inspired from this blog:
-Offer Freebies
-Use catchy words in the title
-Write about Google
-Write about Java or its related technologies
-Write about a new technology
-Write about DZone itself
I will fast forward to the results and conclusion of the experiments:
- The subject of the writing didn't boost my visits to the values that I was expecting BUT it generated some buzz both on DZone and on the blog itself. There are 10 interesting comments on DZone, first of them by Rick one of the site's founders. I also got 5 comments on the blog side.
- The conclusions of all these comments is very clear: Content is the King. You can use all kind of techniques to attract possible clicks but in the longer term, and I quote from Rick, "...the developer audience - they'll slice you down in a New York minute! Feed them useful content or die!". Actually, this point should be the first in everyone's list.
- This one is common sense, but I'll still mention it. Do some research and find some other places to promote your works. One of the comments woke up the detective I always wanted to be, and I did some research about the competition. You have a variety of tools to this, I used Alexa to scout what sites are linking to some popular blog posts. I'll show here just some of them and I quote again from one of my readers, WebmasterNeal: "So it all goes back to trying to find a site with a very narrow focus that is highly visited."
http://www.bloglines.com/
http://friendfeed.com/
http://www.mister-wong.de/
http://www.developpez.net/forums/
http://swik.net/
http://inezha.com/
http://www.articlesnatch.com/
http://slashdot.org/
http://www.mybloglog.com/
http://groovygrails.com/
http://it-republik.de/
http://www.artima.com/index.jsp
http://javahispano.org/
http://netvouz.com/
http://www.blogcatalog.com/
http://www.techmeme.com/
http://www.twine.com/
http://www.socialmedian.com/
http://www.noovo.com/
http://www.trackle.com/
- If you are after DZone votes, go to http://www.dzone.com/links/buttons.jsp and incorporate their button directly in your posts. It is easier for the readers to vote (up or down) your article if you provide them an easy way to do it. Most of them will not go back to the original link just to vote it. There is also a Firefox plugin that I installed to vote the material I read. Keep in mind that not the number of votes determines your position in the ranking.
- If you are trying to report something important, on DZone or other aggregating sites, don't do it just before the weekend. My first feeling is that the largest part of the readers are using their office computers to read these sources of information.
- The higher the rank you manage to get in DZone hierarchy, more visitors you'll gain...
This is all for now, I have learned some lessons with this thing, I even made some interesting discoveries. It also gave me some great ideas about some related articles that I'll write in the future. Articles with captivating content :).
Thank you all for reading and comments.
Bonusscio!
