I’m preparing a presentation on ‘Finding Readers for your Blog’ which I’ll be giving at the Melbourne Blog Training Day next Tuesday.

It’s got me thinking back to some of the bigger days of traffic that I’ve had on my own blogs over the years and I thought I’d open up some discussion on the topic to see if we can identify any trends.

What was your biggest day of Traffic (or ‘days’ if you can think of more than one) and what happened to make them occur?

I asked this on Twitter yesterday and it was interesting to see the responses. Some of the reasons giving included:

• controversial posts
• creative posts
• random links from bigger sites
• social bookmarking events (getting popular on Digg or Delicious)
• ranking high for terms in Google around big news events
• breaking a scoop news story

I’m sure we’ll see some of these themes in your experiences but know that there will be other themes too.

For me there have been many bigger than normal days over the last 8 years. Two that spring to mind include:

• My Six Figure Blogging Moment – I had been blogging for a while and suddenly realised that I was on track for over $100,000 in a year earnings from my blogs. The first time I mentioned it was in an interview that I did. I didn’t really think about the implications of talking about it at the time but that interview went viral – as did my followup post. What kicked it all off was a mention on Slashdot (which at the time was equivalent to getting on the front page of Digg).
• Front page of Yahoo (sort of) – then there was the day that a post on my photography blog was featured by one of Yahoo’s tech blogs. That in itself didn’t sent much traffic but when that particular Yahoo blog’s post was featured on the front page of Yahoo for 4-5 hours one day I saw traffic hit my blog like I’ve never seen traffic before or since. I don’t remember the exact numbers but I saw more traffic from that 4-5 hours than I’d normally see in a week of traffic.

So now it’s over to you. What Was Your Biggest Traffic Day and Why did it Happen?

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

What Was Your Biggest Traffic Day?

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According to Gil Reich of Answers.com, “The most important thing to remember about links is that you’re trying to get somebody else to put your message on their site.” So, how do you do it?

As Reich points out, one way of doing it is through flattery. This tactic should come naturally since most all of us have probably used flattery to get things in the past.

The approach however, is often difficult. Popular link builder Debra Mastaler of Alliance-Link suggests looking for the source instead of targeting sites such as CNN or Digg. Reich also adds that users should target the people who are at the center of the community.

For example, see who is frequently being linked to and tweeted. He says Twitter and other social sites are very helpful because the best link building is done through relationship building.

Reich does offer a word of caution in regards to outbound links. He says users need to be careful and monitor when linking out. With WikiAnswers, Answers.com has to be especially careful since it is user generated content. In addition, they use nofollow and hope the community will not take advantage of them. (Correction: See Comments.)

As for the future of link building, Reich does not see it changing dynamically. He says it is similar to the search industry in that the “Wild West” phase is over and people are doing what works. Talking about on-page optimization, he recalls Google’s Matt Cutts saying that SEOs shouldn’t chase the search engine and alternatively, chase the user. Applying that idea to link building, Reich says, “It’s don’t chase the engines, chase the community.”

Are you link building through relationships?

Posted by randfish

I’ve been having a similar conversation with a number of folks from the world of search that’s interesting enough as to deserve some transparency and discussion. It centers around the idea of the web’s link graph and how it operates to power the rankings of relevant results in the major search engines. If we follow this brief timeline, you’ll see what I’m getting at:

• 1993 – 2000: The beginning of the web is marked by an influx of researchers, academics, hobbyists and enthusiasts. Nearly every link created has an editorial, reference purpose behind it. A link is one page telling its viewers that another page has useful, interesting or worthwhile information about a specific topic.
• 2001 – 2005: As the web commercializes at an accelerated pace and PageRank becomes a familiar concept, links drift further away from editorial votes and more towards self-interested endorsements, often with financial motivations.
• 2006 – 2010: The web’s link graph swings further away from editorial references towards ever-more commercial interests. Meanwhile, the social web rises with the popularity of sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn. These communities often contain a much higher percentage of editorial citations, particularly those that contain smaller communities inside them (LinkedIn groups, pockets of Twitter users and Facebook friends)

During chats with some folks from Bing, Google & the SEO world, it became clear that nearly everyone is aware of this ecosystem and thinking more about how to leverage it to make search better. Bing & Google obviously made back-to-back deals to get the Twitter firehose late last year. Google’s been trying hard to get Facebook data without success (and Bing may have it, thanks to their investment in Facebook in 2007). Both engines could certain extract citation data from other web communities that publicly publish (Delicious, Reddit, Digg, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, StackOverflow and as of today, Quora) and extrapolate reference material.

The problem for the engines is that links on websites have a high probability (probably not 50%, but maybe as high as 20%) of existing specifically to influence their rankings. While some of those influence-targeted links certainly do point to great content that’s relevant and high quality, the engines would prefer to return to a web of "pure" recommendations. The social web might offer more of that type of web environment. Sure, we all tweet/share/post links to our own websites, but those are easy for engines to detect and treat as "internal" references. The "external" endorsements, however, are often much more genuine than what exists on the open web’s link graph.

If you’re in the field of SEO, I think this means social media marketing is a no brainer. And if people aren’t recommending and endorsing your site editorially in their Twitter feeds, Facebook updates, LinkedIn groups, answers on Q+A sites, and when socially bookmarking, tagging and voting, I’d be thinking hard about how to change that.

p.s. I still think the social graph overall is still a very small portion of the engines’ ranking algorithms, but I think Bing & Google are both racing towards innovation on this front as fast as they can. SEOs should, IMO, follow suit.

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Posted by Dr. Pete

Low-quality links are like one-night stands – they’re easy to find and may be fun for a while, but you can’t expect to build anything lasting out of them. Real link-love takes a long-term view and a commitment that too many website owners seem unwilling to make.

I want to tell you a story to try to convince you that building strong, natural links is worth the effort. This is a story from my own blog. I’m not trying to be egotistical, but I want you to understand that this isn’t a story about how yet another post on SEOmoz’s 60,000+ subscriber blog went hot. This is something I made happen on a small blog with a niche audience, and I think anyone is capable of similar success.

How We First Met

It was late 2008, and I was struggling to find some focus for my consulting business and overall marketing strategy. I had a usability blog that was slowly gaining steam, averaging about 60 unique visitors/day and a couple-hundred subscribers, but traffic peaked when I posted and languished the rest of the month. Search-engine traffic was a trickle at best.

I started thinking hard about my process and how I could better package it. Over a month or so, I took some of my core experiences, combined them with industry best practices and came up with a 25-point usability checklist to use for new clients. This was so well-received by clients and peers that I started thinking about turning it into a blog post and free download. I was worried at first – was I giving away too much? I finally decided I needed to take a few marketing risks, so I bit the bullet and released my checklist on February 10, 2009.

Love at First Sight?

Hindsight is 20/20, but I want you to understand that this was hardly a movie love story. My post didn’t hit the home-page of Digg, crashing my servers in fiery glory. This isn’t a story about how I got a ton of traffic on one magical day – it’s about how natural linking has provided me with over a year of traffic and is still going strong.

Here’s a graph of monthly traffic to this blog post since its launch in February 2009:

More than a year after writing it, the post still averages over 100 unique views per day. As of April, it’s driven a total of more than 56,000 unique views.

The Link Love Grows

This is more than just a story about traffic. This single blog post has acquired almost 800 inbound links (according to Yahoo! Site Explorer), including a few heavy hitters like Smashing Magazine, Search Engine Journal, and Occam’s Razor. The post was a 2010 SEMMYs finalist and was mentioned in Avinash Kaushik’s latest book, "Web Analytics 2.0" (p. 171, if you have a copy ).

So, have these links translated into SEO value? Absolutely. To date, search-engine traffic has driven 9,632 visits to this page from 2,563 keyword variations. It’s also done wonders for my ranking – here are just a few examples from SEOmoz’s RankTracker tool:

It’s not shocking that this post might get me the top spot for "website usability checklist", but it has also propelled my overall site to the #7 spot for "website usability", a much more competitive query (Jakob Nielsen holds the top spot).

Some Relationship Advice

Of course, I don’t want this story to be all about me. My goal is to show you that building natural links not only has real business value, but that it’s achievable even for smaller sites in niche industries. This is my advice to you for achieving lasting link-love:

(1) Don’t Take Yourself for Granted

A while back, I heard George Wright speak about how he came up with the idea for the "Will It Blend?" videos. The short version is that he was touring the production facility when he came across a bunch of QA engineers running crazy things through Blendtec blenders. He was amazed by what he saw, but they took it for granted (blending two-by-fours was their job, after all). I love this story, because it’s so applicable to any business. There’s something about your product or service that is amazing, but because you see it every day, you take it for granted. Put down your mission statement and PowerPoint slides and see your product through your customers’ eyes. If you can’t, go find a fresh perspective.

You have a story worth telling, even if you don’t know it. If you think your industry is too "boring" for link-bait, then you’re not trying hard enough. As my Dad likes to say, only boring people get bored.

(2) Be Careful Who You Love

Low-quality links are attractive because they seem easy, but are they really? Let’s look at some hypothetical times to build one link based on common tactics:

• Directory Submissions – 15-30 minutes
• Article Marketing – 15-60 minutes
• Email Link Requests – 60-90 minutes

You might balk at that last one – finding and emailing one prospect should only take a couple of minutes, right? Ok, but what’s your conversion rate on those emails, maybe 1-2%? Let’s say it takes you 1 minute/email – you’re talking about 50-100 minutes to get one link back (I rounded down to be generous).

So, what would it take to build 800 links, even low-quality ones? At a very generous estimate of 15 minutes/link, you’re talking about 200 hours of work. Even counting research and testing on my target audience, I’d estimate that my checklist blog post took about 40 hours. My last e-book took 30 hours to research, write, and do layout. Do low-quality links still seem like a bargain?

(3) Natural Link-Love Is Real

Low-quality links are superficial. What you get in return for them is a tiny bit of SEO value, driving people to content that usually isn’t strong enough to get any love on its own. Building strong content that attracts natural links does more than build SEO value. It builds a real audience and actual, in-person relationships.

In 2010, I’ve calculated that roughly 65% of my revenue can be traced back to either blogging or social media. Great content gets the attention of like-minded people and builds your brand. It almost magically makes every piece of content that comes after it stronger.

The flipside of this equation is that it takes real relationships to drive natural links. Take 50% of the time you spend building low-quality links and spend it participating – get to know the communities, blogs, and linkerati in your industry niche. Give back to those communities, and when the time comes that you have something really outstanding to share, you’ll already have an audience for it.

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Posted by randfish

Historically, I’ve been fairly narrow in what I read in the blogosphere and tech arena (almost all SEO-centric stuff). You can see my Firefox sidebar list here, which  hasn’t changed much since 2008 with the exception of the blogs and news sections. But, over the past 6 months, I’ve been broadening out considerably and found that it adds a great deal to the conversations I’m able to participate in and contribute to, especially as SEOmoz itself has expanded from the SEO world to the larger technology and startup world. For the New Year, I thought I’d share some of the sources that have contributed most on this front and some of my favorite posts/contributions from those sources.

#1 – Hacker News

(http://news.ycombinator.com)

I find more good stuff here than anywhere else, and the diversity is impressive, too. Tragically, Hacker News is also a place for lots of misinformation, fear, and loathing around SEO, but it’s good to get a sense for how the rest of the technology world still views our niche. The signal to noise ratio is higher than on places like delicious/popular, the tech subreddit or Digg (which has become largely useless to tech professionals as its moved away from its roots).

A few items I’ve found via Hacker News include:

• Why everything you think about User Centered Design in Wrong
• On Self Promotion
• The death of the boring blog post

#2 – A VC

(http://www.avc.com)

Fred writes compelling pieces consistently, almost never gets preachy, is self-promotional in a highly credible and useful way and brings up topics I wouldn’t have thought about without him. Most of us can’t have Fred on our boards or as an investor, but we can get into his head via his blog and participating more in the comments there has been a priority of mine for a while (he’s built a remarkable community in the comments).

Some favorite posts:

• Tenacity
• The "We Need to Own" Baloney
• Ten Characteristics of Great Companies

#3 – Chris Dixon

(http://cdixon.org)

Chris, like Fred, delivers crystal clear value propostions with his posts. And IMO, he’s even higher signal to noise than Fred. I don’t always agree with him on everything, but I like the way he thinks about problems, I like the ones he brings up and I think he has his finger intensely on the pulse of what startups and technologists (and technical marketers like SEOs) are thinking about and dealing with. It’s a pleasure to see a new post from Chris – here’s to hoping he makes many more in 2010.

Some favorites include:

• Why the web will continue to grow rapidly
• Man and superman
• Software patents should be abolished

#4 – Techmeme

(http://techmeme.com)

Techmeme is an obvious choice, but it’s also critical to the list. If it weren’t for Techmeme, I’d have to wade through ReadWriteWeb, Mashable and Techcrunch post-by-post, every day. Don’t ever leave us, Gabe.

No specific posts here – there’s far too many to name, and the site updates much too quickly for me to even recall all the great stuff I’ve found here. However, I will say that I highly recommend m.techmeme.com for mobile browsing. It’s been a joy to scroll through every time my wife takes extra-long in the dressing room at Anthropologie.

#5 – Answers On Startups

(http://answers.onstartups.com)

Launched just this past October, Answers On Startups has become a haven for learning more about the challenges, issues and questions entrepreneurs face in the technology world. I’ve recommended it before, and early on participated heavily (and I’d like to do more of that in the future), but if you’re seeking answers from highly authoritative folks in a scalable fashion, this is the spot. I’m really impressed by the quality of many contributions there - the signal to noise is pretty exceptional.

Some of the best include:

• What’s more important: release fast or getting it right?
• Free Trial vs. Freemium
• Qualities/skills of a CEO

#6 – Daring Fireball

(http://daringfireball.net)

In my ideal world, 5 years from now, when I’ve been put out to pasture by someone smarter and more capable, or bought out I’d have a blog like this. Some entries are just links, some are lengthy and thoughtful and all are interesting and worth reading. Author John Gruber also brings a remarkably diverse range of topics to the site and yet somehow, signal to noise remains high.

A few recent picks:

• Google’s Meaning of Open (a short, but flawless skewering)
• The Next iPhone
• A Liberal, Accurate Regex Pattern for Matching URLs

#7 – Steve Blank

(http://steveblank.com)

A few of Steve’s posts are not only relevant, but serve to actually change direction in the executive ranks here at SEOmoz. That’s high praise, but if you read the blog, you’ll see what I mean. Steve’s been there, and his experiences run in shocking parallel to the issues we face or worry about on a regular basis. Even when I disagree with points, the logic and thought he puts into the post makes for a great read and a hard think.

Some of his best:

• The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas are No Longer Free
• Lies Entrepreneurs Tell Themselves
• Good Enough Decision Making

#8 – NYTimes Most Emailed

(http://www.nytimes.com/gst/mostemailed.html)

Despite the financial and institutional problems they face, the NYTimes still puts out absolutely phenomenal content on nearly every area of life. From cooking to politics, travel to health, there is amazing material to be found in the Grey Lady, and the Most Emailed list is the place to find the best of the best.

Some favorites:

• Twitter Chatter During the Superbowl (I love their interactive graphics)
• Using Menu Psychology to Entice Diners
• Google Keeps Tweaking its Search Engine
• 100 Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do (Part 1)

#9 - Venture Hacks

(http://venturehacks.com)

 When I was out trying to raise a second round of VC this summer (big mistake – more on that in a future post), Venturehacks’ historic content was invaluable. However, visiting the site made me realize how much good stuff there is that doesn’t apply only to those currently raising money. They’ve got some seriously great writers/contributors, invaluable interviews and tackle tough subjects.

My personal favorites recently included:

• 10 Skills I look for before writing a check
• How to develop your customers like you develop your product
• The Arrogant VC: Why VCs are disliked by entrepreneurs

#10 – Twittersphere

(http://twittersphere.com)

Since they don’t publish archives (the most frustrating feature), I’m unable to show off just how cool this site is and has been over the last few months, but just try visiting a couple times a day for the next few weeks and you’ll see. It’s remarkable how much good stuff gets re-tweeted (and how much junk – signal to noise is about 15%, which is still decent since it’s easy to skim and consume at will). You can also get a sense for how important Twitter’s link graph is to the engines through Twittersphere – a lot of pages that have 0 links will have thousands of tweets pretty fast.

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Your turn! I’d love to see the sites outside the SEO world that give you the most professional value (and I’m certain the rest of our readers would too). Feel free to link drop even to yourself, so long as it’s relevant

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Although news outlets continually bring reports about new features on social sites such as Facebook and Twitter, there is actually a lot happening with social aggregation sites as well. To catch us up to speed, Brent Csutoras gave WebProNews a rundown of the latest news from both Digg and StumbleUpon.

First of all, Digg has a new trending feature that allows users to be more involved in the actual voting process. Since people are always complaining about the items that reach the front page, Digg is incorporating this new feature to give users more of an opportunity to vote on a particular item.

On Digg’s homepage, the feature will display an item that is close to being moved to the front page and give users 10 minutes to vote to move it or not. After the 10 minutes are up, the feature will show whether or not the item was moved.

StumbleUpon has also seen some drastic changes over the last several months. Earlier this year, the company broke away from eBay and is currently being run by its original founders. Since becoming independent again, StumbleUpon revamped its design, added more content to its homepage, and essentially, tried to become more like the other social sites.

Most recently, the site has made an attempt to focus on the social profile. Csutoras however, does not welcome this change. For him, StumbleUpon was different from the other social sites. He relied on StumbleUpon for finding really unbiased and good content from anyone. But now, the content is heavily dependent upon the social group that recommended it, much like Facebook and Twitter.

“It does put an extra click or two between you and content,” he said.

All these changes are currently in beta and Csutoras is quick to point out that StumbleUpon is very good about listening to user feedback.

What are your thoughts on the new features from Digg and StumbleUpon?

A guest post from Glen ViperChill.

I’ve read a lot of blogging success stories in my four-year blogging history. Sadly, they’ve always been about other people, rather than me. And, when I do see them, although they are real, I get a sense that the owner didn’t have to work as hard as I have. I see people getting big on Digg yet my domain is banned for no reason or linked to by Seth Godin and getting ‘famous’ overnight. I don’t want to sound bitter, but it just seemed like success was happening to everyone else.

Once I had this realisation, I decided that if I wasn’t going to get featured on Digg or Delicious for my new site, I would work on:

• Being the most authentic blogger in my niche
• Providing the best content that I can
• Interacting within my community as much as possible.

And what happened? In one year I managed to build my blog to just over 4,000 subscribers. Sure, it isn’t the success story that everyone else raves about, but it’s realistic and it is attainable. Or maybe I’m being hard on myself, because I don’t see that many blogs reaching these numbers either.

1. Getting 500 Subscribers is Much Harder than 1,000

Some of you might be completely confused by that statement and to others it will make perfect sense; let me explain. When I look at my own stats, I can see that it took me 5 months to reach 500 subscribers (which isn’t a bad rate of growth at all). Can you guess how many it took to reach 1,000? Just two.

You see, when I first started out, I was a complete nobody in my niche. I was fairly known in the internet marketing industry but totally unheard of when it came to personal development. Because of that, I had to establish a brand. I went with a logo people would remember, a unique design, and a desire to focus on content that simply helped people be who they want to be. Everything I would write would have the focus of helping people get what they want out of life.

From there I started commenting on other blogs, being active in Twitter and writing the best articles I could. I worked hard, but within a few months I was at the 500 subscriber mark. Once you get to this stage, things start getting much, much easier because when you’re trying to promote content that has no audience, you have to find people who might want to read it and show up where they are. Once you have an audience and write great content, they’re going to start sharing it for you.

If you’re struggling to get your first few hundred subscribers then don’t worry, as they’re far harder to get than the next few hundred. With the 5 months left in the year I managed to grow my site by another 3,000 subscribers. How’s that for exponential growth.

2. If You’re Going to Guest Post, Vary Your Audience

I have been one of the most active guest posters on the internet in the last few months and for one simple reason: guest posting works. It gets you out there in front of a new audience and just as importantly, an audience that understands blogs and what they are all about. If someone subscribers to another blog in your niche, there’s a good chance they will subscribe to yours if you’re writing great content. One thing I have noticed some people do is “piggyback” off a certain blog and try to write there as often as possible.

This is usually for big blogs which can help you get a lot of traffic and subscribers quite quickly, but things will soon die down. If someone has seen you guest post on a site 5 times and still haven’t subscribed, they probably won’t when you write your 6th article. There are a few benefits to varying your guest posting which include:

• Reaching a new audience: If you’re going for the same sites all the time, you’re going to reach the same readers. By varying your activities you can reach new eyeballs that want your content.
• Creating new connections: Guest posting shouldn’t just be thought of as something you can do to benefit your own site, but also something you can do to help the author of another site. Most bloggers love free content in return for a backlink so if you can help as many people as possible, there’s no harm in that

3. Find Ways to Collaborate with Others

As a blogger, I’m quite sad about the rise of Twitter in a way. Instead of the hundreds of backlinks a good blog post could get a few years ago, it will now get hundreds of tweets. Sure the tweets can bring you traffic, but they are not going to help your post move up the ranks in search engines. Even as a way for collaboration, people are focusing on twitter communication rather than working with people via their blogs. Usually these writers are coming from the scarcity mindset and if they link to other bloggers they’re going to lose readers and help their “competitor” grow.

First of all, if you think of other bloggers in your niche as competitors then you have a totally backwards mindset. Secondly, I’m here to tell you that collaborating with other bloggers in my niche has been one of the best things I have done. To begin with, I created a list of the top Personal Development Blogs. This ranks all of the blogs by their statistics and of course helps my site visitors find other amazing blogs to read. This page has been linked to by hundreds of websites and it has helped put me in touch with tons of other bloggers.

On top of that, I also ran a series called the Personal Development face-off. I had the idea thanks to Daniel Scocco doing this in the blogging niche and thought that the content generated here would be excellent. Even though I was featuring two other bloggers on my site every week, hundreds of people emailed me to say how much they loved the series. This positioned me as someone who was at the top of my industry because I had all of these top bloggers taking time out to work with me and because I was sharing the best content in the niche.

Don’t be afraid of promoting other bloggers. These days, I try to promote great content on other sites as much as possible. It will come back your way.

Glen is the author of ViperChill, a blog on Viral Marketing. He aims to help people create remarkable websites that others just naturally want to talk about.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

3 Lessons I Learned Building 4,000 Subscribers in 12 Months

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Posted by randfish

When I first started in SEO, link acquisition was almost always a manual process. I’d search the engines for links that pointed to the competition, find relevant directories and link lists, email relevant sites and beg, borrow or bribe (aka buy advertising) to get a link. I tried reciprocal link building (and did some pretty dumb stuff). Then, as I got more intertwined in the SEO community, I found vendors who built large networks of sites, spammed blogs/forums/guestbooks and ran text link sales operations. I leveraged these services to help clients rank better, almost always with great success. Then I met Matt Cutts, found out more about Google’s webspam team, saw penalties and their impact (remember Florida?) and even found some sites we worked on in the Sandbox.

Over time, I got smarter. I read papers about Hilltop, Trustrank, Anti-Trustrank and many more. I saw sites escaping the sandbox once they’d earned greater quantities of trusted links. I started understanding that Google’s search quality team was only going to get better at recognizing and counting legitimate links (and tossing out the junk), so I focused exclusively on more "white hat" kinds of links. That’s when I discovered linkbaiting and the power of Digg, Reddit & StumbleUpon to drive traffic that would naturally link. We had success with quizzes (and after Matt left SEOmoz, he had a little too much success) and viral content that earned thousands of links overnight and started offering it as a service.

As our clientele and foci changed, we changed again. Linkbait gave way to broader viral marketing efforts. Social media marketing arose as a practical and high quality way to earn links. Our clients became larger brands and organizations and one-off link projects weren’t scalable, so we consulted on tactics like content and technology licensing, training editorial staff to earn links & participate in the social media world themselves, and incentivizing user-generated content, which in turn brought links from those users. We found ways to drive natural links to deep pages on huge sites targeting the long tail, how to combine embeddable content and user-adopted brand affinity to drive link growth. And we stopped buying links entirely.

I figured a visual history might make for a compelling view:

Now, link building is changing again. I’m of the distinct impression that the engines (nowadays referring to Bing & Google, since the others are all but out of the picture) are evolving to keep up with the web’s breakneck speed and new forms of data, along with new ways of analyzing links, are making themselves felt in the SERPs. My guesses/observations would include:

• Twitter really is cannibalizing the web’s link graph, or at least, the blogosphere’s and Google seems to be using Tweet counts in some way (though possibly only in the QDF algo).
• The acceleration rate of link acquisition and the freshness of new links is having a more dramatic impact than before, and the "old crusty links" paradigm may be fading a bit.
• Brand mentions and keyword associations with brand names are influencing the rankings more and more.
• Un-trustworhty link patterns are conferring more filters and penalties than ever before.
• QDD is as strong as ever, and vertical results are more prominent than at any time in the engines’ histories.
• Google and Microsoft both know more about traffic and surfing habits than ever before, and this data is likely being used to, at the least, quality control for potential algorithmic misses.
• Ad blindness is worse than ever (16% of Internet users are responsible for 85% of all ad clicks on the web), forcing the engines to make ads more relevant and more obvious to continue earning revenue.
• Paid inclusion is going away, and talk of potentially paying sites to be in the indices (the reverse model) is in the air (or maybe not).
• Billions of non-linked "references" flow out across the web through social media messages, emails, tweets and IMs. Someone, at some search engine, is undoubetdly mining this data to see how they can derive value and relevancy from it.

As marketers, we have to evolve or be left behind by those who can better adapt. It’s hard to see the forest for the trees right now, but I think we’re closing in on a time when real-time, social and traditional web references are all a part of the rankings equation. The future may be less about links and more about brand building and brand participation. I don’t want to be the most-linked-to site in my niche; I want to be the site that’s synonymous with my niche.

Now we just have to figure out the tactics…

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This week I’m featuring a short series of interviews with successful bloggers looking at a popular post on their blog and why they think it went viral. Today Vitaly Friedman from Smashing Magazine has agreed to dissect the popularity of one of their most popular posts.

1. What is the post on your blog that has had the most traffic in the last 12 months?

The most popular post in our magazine was the article “Adobe Photoshop Tutorials – Best Of” which was published in October 2008. It is one of the many tutorials round-ups that we’ve done then. Overall, the post has now almost a 1,000,000 unique visits.

2. Where did the traffic mainly come from?

Most traffic came from Google, followed by social media, in particular via StumbleUpon, Twitter, Digg and Reddit (in this order). Since we are paying a huge amount of attention and time investment into preparing well-researched, high-quality posts, it is very likely that stories published on SM are going fairly well in social media. After all, almost every story needs over 25 hours to be completed. Another reason for our popularity in social media is the simple fact that we don’t post too often – at most 2 articles per day appear on Smashing Magazine.

About a couple of months after the post was published the organic traffic via Google etc. started to catch up, so at the moment we (on average) have much more traffic from search engines than from social media. All the social media together are still only a small portion of the traffic coming from Google.

3. Did you do anything extra to market or promote this post or did it just happen organically?

We never push a story hard to reach some critical mass of diggs, votes or tweets. The post did well, because many designers found it useful and bookmarked it or recommended it. That’s the basis and the requirements for a good, successful, popular post.

4. What can we as bloggers learn from the success of this post?

The quality of the content defines the nature of post’s popularity over months and years. The more time you invest into preparing a post, the more quality it will deliver to the reader and the more appreciative your readers will be. The latter will deliver your blog organic growth, traffic and solid readership. That’s as simple as that. Deliver quality and you’ll be rewarded with good reputation and good traffic.

5. I notice you’ve got a book coming out soon – how did it come to be? Got any tips for aspiring bloggers wanting to do a book?

Yes, we are currently in the final stage of publishing our “Smashing Book” – a printed book about best practices in modern Web design and development. Books are still valuable, because they are more solid and permanent compared to bits and bytes. The idea to create a book came because we wanted to explore how we can strengthen Smashing branding in further traditional media. We decided to create the community book, a book that is based upon ideas and suggestions of our readers, involving them in basically every step of the process.

Publishing a book is easy these days is easy – with digital printing and numerous layout applications one can create an e-book in hours. The process is also fast and relatively cheap. But this is not what we decided to do. The Smashing Book is printed the traditional way. We aim to the masses. This is possible because we have a huge audience and we are selling to them directly, bypassing common bookstores and shops. To do this we need plenty of money to pay for paper, layout and printing. But there is a traditional solution to go around this, the pre-sale phase. We have started the pre-sale to gather money and estimate the circulation (yes, it’s a secret). In exchange for customer’s trust, we are offering a big discount of 20%.

Since we wanted everybody to be able to afford the Smashing Book, we have decided to introduce something that we call “social shipping”. The idea here is that we offer customers from US and Germany free shipping, but since shipping costs are extremely high to some parts of the world, they can voluntarily pay more for the shipping of their copy. And, of course, selling around the world needs some serious logistics. There are literally tons to move. An e-book would be more much more comfortable, but we hope that our readers will appreciate our efforts to create a physical piece that can be put on the shelf. The printed Smashing Book will appear in the end of this year.

Check out the Smashing Magazin upcoming book (it is available for pre-order) here.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Vitaly Friedman of Smashing Magazine Shares a Popular Post Case Study

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Posted by Danny Dover

 It is a typical Tuesday afternoon in suburbia California. Jenny, a sixteen year old girl is taking a sick day from school. With a runny nose, she sits idly on her bed surfing Facebook. At the same time, 2,000 miles away in Seattle, a twenty-two year old ambitious college drop-out named Kevin is on Twitter complaining about his sore throat. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, a 40 year old single mother in London searches Google on her phone for the location of the nearest Boots drug store so she can buy cold medicine.

If a human from 200 years ago were to look at our planet today, it would appear completely alien. Culture shifts and technology improvements have drastically changed our perceived landscape. One tiny part of this is the use of social media and search engines. More than ever, teenagers are complaining about their parents joining Facebook and parents are complaining about their children interfering with their online social lives. Together they are sharing small events like sore throats, runny noses and big events like floods and hurricanes. Communicating online has become intertwined with our lives and has now become deeply integrated with our work, education and entertainment.

But how did this happen? While I don’t know for sure, I do recognize the patterns. For companies like Twitter, Google, Digg and Facebook, it started with a small group of entrepreneurs in California whose great ideas eventually went viral and spread around the globe. This word ‘viral’ describes a pattern and has become a buzzword. It is usually used to describe the virus like spread of ideas and technologies. The amazing idea behind a virus like spread is it expands exponentially. Once it starts, it multiples and multiples until nothing can stop it.

It is the great irony I see in this buzzward that prompted this post. I believe the viral nature of social media and popular technology companies is what will paradoxically allow us to prevent the viral spread of real viruses and pandemics. This is not a new idea. Many vaccines are in essence inert viruses fighting would-be viruses.

In 2006, a man by the name of Dr. Larry Brilliant won the TED prize for calling for a new global system that could identify pandemics before they spread. Dr. Brilliant (you can’t make this stuff up) is world renowned for his efforts in successfully eradicating smallpox from the planet. Before winning the TED prize, he had been inspired by the potential of a Canadian system called GPHIN. GPHIN is a system of web crawlers and analyzers that scour web based content looking for trends in keywords like ‘fever’, ‘cough’, ‘tired’, ‘sick’ and ‘flu’. Using this methodology, GPHIN was able to detect a would-be SARS outbreak six weeks before any other system (including the systems used by the World Health Organization). Quick responding officials were able to isolate the outbreak and prevent a global pandemic. Dr. Brilliant later said that this possible for two reasons.

1. Early Detection
2. Rapid Response

Shortly after his major call for action, Dr. Brilliant was hired as Executive Director of the then newly formed Google.org. This new philanthropic arm of Google was funded by 1% of all Google profits. Dr. Brilliant eventually used these resources to build an early detection system that is used today to help predict flu trends. He built the system he called for and the world has been better off because of it.

Unfortunately, this is not where the story ends. Larry Brilliant has since left Google for other endeavors. GPHIN and Google Flu Trends continue to save lives but they are only the tip of the iceberg. Google is now falling behind new competitors that dominate the ever growing real-time web. Status updates from Twitter and Facebook are being produced and becoming obsolete so quickly that Google’s index can’t keep up. We saw this with Michael Jackson’s death and we will see it again in the future.

Social media has the potential to become the greatest early detection system that the world has ever seen. It is faster, nimbler and has more access to user data than any traditional search engine. Not only does Facebook have the data necessary to see who is suffering from an illness, it has the data necessary to predict who these ill people will most likely come in contact with. Twitter has the data to make similar predictions (although less accurately because people don’t physically spend time with Twitter friends like they do with Facebook friends) but enjoys the added benefit of being accessed and updated from any place with mobile phone or WIFI service. (90% of Twitter requests are made to it’s API, whereas only 12% of Facebook users access Facebook through it’s mobile apps).

These two social media platforms by themselves have the ability to enable ordinary people to report their symptoms in real-time. Specialists like epidemiologists and statisticians could then identify threats (early detection) and use these same communication channels to direct aid workers (rapid response) on how best to isolate viruses before they become pandemics. If the features of other social media platforms and modern search engines were added to this theoretical system, specialists could for the first time ever educate the global community in real time. (Think about how many people read stories on Digg or about the much larger amount of people who read Google Adsense ads every day.)

Theory and predictions are helpful but just like verbal contracts, they are only worth the paper they are written on. Luckily for us, this theoretical system is already becoming reality today. People are already reporting their symptoms on Twitter and on Facebook. Likewise, disease experts and aid workers are already using social media to organize relief efforts. Although a unified, non-government controlled system for monitoring these platforms doesn’t currently exist, all of the pieces are in place. Dr. Brilliant said that there are two steps necessary for preventing pandemics. Social media is completing the first step (early detection) to a degree that even he couldn’t imagine. Better still, this is not costing the public a dime.

The world is changing in parallel with the internet. Next time you hear someone complain about "pointless" status updates, take the time to explain it to them. Social media is powered by all of us individually. Because of this, you have the ability to make a positive difference.

UPDATE: There has been some very healthy discussion in the comments that I would like to address here. Thank you 0lly and Bludge for bringing this up.

What about false alarms? Clearly, social media will have a lot of noise mixed in with legitimate concerns. Just like good ideas, bad ideas can spread virally as well. Paranoia and misinformation run rampant in the media and online.

So how do medical professionals use a system that will likely have a lot of misinformation and noise? The key is acknowledging that limitation and designing the system to account for it. The reason that GPHIN was so successful, was not that it sent an e-mail directly to health authorities every time someone mentioned "cough", instead it was so powerful because it used aggregate information to identify real trends. Real people, including doctors, look over the information and decide if it is worth pursuing or not. It is natural to assume the front end of a system like this might look something Twitter search with has every relevant Tweet visible. This is not how it works. Instead I think a more accurate representation would be that of Google Flu Trends (aggregate information) with trends that can be broken down by location and with the help of social media, broken down into social groups.

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I am not and do not claim to be a medical or disease expert. If you are, I invite you to help me make this post better. As always, feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments below. If you would rather not do that, feel free to e-mail me. All of my contact information is available on my profile: Danny Thanks!

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Other Similar Discussions:

Twitter: Growing Virally But Can It Stop Viruses? – Chris Thorman writes a very compelling post that adds the use of Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) to the discussion. From the article "The combination of social media and EMRs, in some form or another, will undoubtedly be part of the future of tracking disease outbreaks. The how and when of that process remains complicated, dependent on health agencies, governments and the doctors themselves to implement the appropriate systems."

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