The Top Five Sites Growth Due to Controversy and Content
1. Problogger
With 153,283 visitors, Darren Rowse comes in first. Rowse suggests bloggers stop worrying about Page Rank and focus on building a better blog.
“You see - Google [is] in the business of helping their users find great, authoritative and credible content on any given topic and I’m increasingly becoming convinced that the more you spend time building sites that have that content the more highly you’ll be ranked in Google,” as Rowse suggests.
Good advice, however, the explosive growth was more likely due to the controversy surrounding the Page Rank slap in late 2007. As Google hand edited many blogs selling text links, Problogger.net was penalized. And although, Rowse stopped selling text links in 2005, Problogger was still penalized.
After this embarrassing mistake, Google then hand edited Problogger.net back to its original Page Rank — thus resulting in hundreds of links, from Google’s mistake, for Problogger.net, including some in traditional publishers like newspapers and select magazines.
2. John Chow
With 136,937 visitors, John Chow secures second. And what a year John Chow has enjoyed on the way to second place. In 2007, Chow was banned from Digg (later unbanned, but still auto-buried), hand edited by Google and Technorati, and featured as a hot community for the entire year. His year was so bright he “had to wear shades.”
Much like Darren Rowse, John Chow enjoyed the huge traffic boosts from the controversy behind both the Google slap and Digg ban. However, John Chow also grabbed second from the traffic of his transparent blog coverage. His income review posts each month are among his most popular posts.
According to Chow, “The blog started 2007 with $3,440.66 in monthly income. Eleven months later, the figure had mushroomed to $27,240.83.”
3. Dosh Dosh
Comes in a close third with 133,080 visitors, Dosh Dosh, only slightly behind Chow with 3,000 less visitors than Chow. According to Dosh Dosh it’s the creative content behind his success. One of his successful content strategies was starting an advice column. His new column could explain the explosive growth Dosh Dosh enjoys.
According to him, “By setting up an advice column, you are inviting users to tell you what they want to hear, read and know. As a publisher, this feedback allows you to better organize your content development strategy and determine what to publish and how to improve your overall content focus.”
He also touches on the benefits of starting an advice column by writing: an advice column helps receive visitor feedback, rewards your readers, develops reader loyalty, and boosts monetization. Seeing the benefits for Dosh Dosh makes starting an advice column a worthwhile idea.
4. Courtney Tuttle
After only eleven months, 56,128 visitors is impressive. Really impressive. Tuttle’s first post was Feb. 12th, 2007. Going from zero readers and zero traffic to 1,476 readers and 56,128 monthly visitors is indeed impressive.
The clear voice and thorough details written-into each post might account for this impressive growth Courtney has seen. Among other strategies, Courtney attributes to the growth is the use of Technorati tags.
“If you want to increase your blog’s exposure, make sure you’re using Technorati Tags! Technorati is a blog search engine, so getting your blog in their listings can bring you some valuable visitors,” notes Courtney.
5. Income.com
John Reese, the notorious ‘Internet marketing guru’ places last. From June to September, Reese was set to grab first, but didn’t maintain the growth and crashed in November. The tremendous growth was due, in part, to the rough launch of BlogRush, the widget for ‘free traffic’ Reese created back in September.
Although the traffic is down for the year, Reese remains optimistic saying, ” As you probably noticed, buzz about BlogRush truly exploded across the Web — it seems like it was everywhere. There were tons of positive posts made about the service, but there were quite a few negative ones too. We definitely did a lot of things right with our public beta launch, and we did a lot of things wrong.”
“So always keep that in mind. No matter ‘where’ something is on any given day, you should be focused on gradually improving it.”
Follow the Trend
After reviewing the success of these top earners, the trend seems to be content. By focusing on the quality and quantity of your content, you can carve out a position within your market. And continually focusing on content can keep your brand at the top of its market.
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These are some sites I definitely have to check out. Their strategies, if applicable to my blog, could bring in those visitors.