Secondly, you’ve hit on a tactic that many don’t give much thought to but can be really powerful: writing about something that wil be happening in the future earlier than most. Obviously, if it’s a real exclusive then you run with it but for most of us we should simply look at what is/may be happening many months ahead almost like looking into a crystal ball.

For exampe: I got a lot of hits when I started writing about ie7 early on. Now that it’s coming closer to release and more people are interested in it, I’ve got a backlog of well linked-to posts and articles.

Another example that’s Australian-specific was when the GST (it’s a tax, like VAT) was introduced in 2000. Everyone knew it was coming so I started writing about it 6-12 months beforehand. And when it finally came I had a massive influx of visitors for most of late-2000 and early 2001 (of course, this was before the days of blogging).

That’s why us bloggers we’re more like investigative journlaists then we realise – we’re all looking for that next litle scoop.

It was a little electric scooter that looked cool, so I ran a story that was picked up by Gizmodo and Engadget. Congrats Darren, it’s tough to do. I hope you have many more like it.

Quite nice on a site that was only a few days old at the time!

Just because you don’t have a signed NDA doesn’t mean you are always out of the water. Don’t forget the trouble Apple Insider is in after Apple’s lawyers attacked them when they published information about not yet released products. Most companies are not as aggressive as Apple when it comes to protecting secrets though.