also.known.as “spvn”

Like any other blogger, I’ve always been searching for ways to drive more traffic to my blog, be it through SEO or whatnot. However, in almost every article I’ve seen providing tips on how to drive more traffic to your blog, almost all of them suggest using social bookmarking websites, whereby you submit your stories to a site such as Digg or Reddit and hope it reaches the front page by sheer popularity. Very few articles will eventually reach the front page, and it’s not easy to get there. But if you do, the rewards are pretty substantial.

Luckily for me, I got lucky a few weeks ago and my post on “Why Quake Live Will Be the Best FPS Ever” got to the front page of N4G, a social news site for gamers. You have no idea how excited I was as I watched my view count shoot to more than a thousand on that day. Previously, I was averaging 5 to 10 posts a day at best. I was elated no doubt, but afterwards, in retrospect, there are a few lessons to learn from this about such sites.

• Sensationalism – I never noticed it when first submitting the post, but a sensational and outrageous title was definitely the primary reason why my story managed to reach the front page. Some people probably couldn’t wait to read the article so that they could argue with me about how Killzone 2 was tons better. Others on the other hand were glad someone shared their taste.
• Don’t expect to get loyal readers – My view count only shot up for that day to more than a thousand, the next day it was a few hundred, by the third day my stats were back to previous levels, only slightly higher. And they’ve been like that all the way. I’m doing  a little better now, averaging 10+ views a day, but nowhere near good yet.
• Most people don’t bother reading the entire article – I know this because I actually wanted to test if people bother to click on those “For more information, read this post” links. So when I realised my story had hit the front page, I hurriedly wrote up another short post and linked to it at the end of my main story. In the end, I had 1250 views for the main story and only 70 views for that short post at the end of the day. Sure, some of them probably saw the link but didn’t bother clicking it, but the fact that only 5.6% of the original readers bothered to read on for more information shows how people don’t really bother much.
• Quality doesn’t matter – Seriously, when it comes to getting traffic from social news sites, the quality of your post itself doesn’t matter. People have no idea what to expect from your post except from your title. No matter how good your post is, it is highly unlikely that people are going to add your site to their RSS reader just because they liked your one post. So, you’re going to get traffic regardless of whether you can spell simple words.
• People can get A-N-A-L – So, after I found out how useful social news sites could be to gain traffic, I submitted another one of my posts, which in my opinion is much more informative and interesting, and is a post which I really want people to read. However, it got rejected by someone because “article is a month old”. Here’s the thing, my post on Quake Live was almost equally old, yet no one bothered to report it. Yet for some strange reason they decided to do so with this post, and I have no idea why, nor do I have any control over what they want to do.

In conclusion…

Are social news sites the best way to gain traffic? Definitely not. You have no control over how your story does, and even if you are successful, you’re not going to gain any loyal RSS subscribers from that. However, it definitely does help with your SEO in my opinion, because after that day, more people have reached my blog from random search terms than before. And I’ve definitely seen more people visit my blog on a daily basis, though it’s still pretty inconsistent, and I have a very small reader base. Most of them probably reached via search engines and only bothered to read that one post.

In conclusion: trying to drive traffic to your blog can be a pain in the ****.