I love days like today. You get out of bed after a nice night’s sleep and the sun is shining, the birds are singing and you have a gem of a scoop waiting for you in your inbox from a reader of your blog giving you the story of the month (maybe year) exclusively.
I had to do a little background work but the story was right, a new DSLR camera from Canon – the Canon Rebel XT, and no one else had posted about it yet (most other sites are bound by agreements with the manufacturers and can’t post til tonight), so I posted it a couple of hours ago and am now enjoying watching the traffic flood in.
It’s quite exhilarating to see your traffic graph come alive – it just jumped from 350 visitors per hour to over 2000. This is going to be a fun day.
very cool.
I had that with the Motorola E1060 not iPhone story today. Got the first tip at 3AM and had the story up a little before 7AM. So fun!
How do these scoops equal traffic, though? People have to visit the site before they know about the scoop. I am assuming the scoop means alot on incoming links (and therefore traffic)?
Yeah Tim, Scoop generally = incoming links. Its amazing how quickly a story spreads. Within 5 minutes of me posting this story it had appeared on a number of digital photography discussion forums. In addition to that I emailed a few key people that I knew would be interested in the story – but mostly the traffic that is coming in now comes from one or two major forums.
Being the first site with the information in a niche with as many obsessed fans/users of digital cameras means that you don’t have to do much to spread the word. Readers do it for you – its classic viral marketing.
The other beauty of being first is that you are often the first to be indexed by Google which brings another wave of traffic later on and another wave of people linking to you.
Nice one… good work. I guess this sort of thing wont work for everyone, but for your niche i can see how effective it is.