Friday, July 20, 2007

It's not about the spiders

The Beaufort Gazette recently posted a fairly routine AP story on its Weird News page online. (Teen claims spiders alerted her to fire).

Somehow the popularity/referral service Digg latched onto that link, and before long the spider Diggers accounted for four times as much traffic as the sites homepage.

Now this isn't an appeal for more stories about spiders. But it can be a useful reminder about the power of the referral services. Articles on most of our sites provide links to Digg, del.ic.ious, Newsvine and others on articles. You want to be sure you have them all available.
P.S. Sorry about the lack on new posts here. We were busy with a board of directors meeting and other matters here and I just didn't have much time. I'm scheduled to be on the road in the Carolinas next week, but will try to do better anyhow.

2 comments:

  1. But it is about the spiders. If it wasn't an interesting story no one would would have Digged (Dugged?) it in the first place, button or no.

    Furthermore I'd wager that they didn't use the buttons anyway (any way to track this?).

    I'm an avid del.icio.us user, and all my web browsers are setup to share links with click and nary a thought to those little site buttons.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous7:02 PM

    The more buttons for the more social networking site you can cram on your site, the more chance you have of making your article a star! A star! Page views don't lie, and of all that one-off traffic you get I'm sure there's one or two people out there who will fall in love with your site and become a loyal loyal loyal reader.

    ReplyDelete

 
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