So some people might have been wondering what was with yesterdays out of the blue post regarding Theme Forest, sure it was news but it’s not really our style. Well today was going to be the day where I introduced one really simple easy tip via a case study but it didn’t go according to plan.

Breaking news

Being the first news source while great is not normally very profitable if your small, chances are the big sites just simply will not link to you. Even if your well known in the industry people are far more likely to read a news portal such as Techcrunch. These sites tend to have a massive readership but most of those readers use them more as a central location for information following the links (trackbacks) to other sites for their review and commentary. If your going to break a story or write a story its worth looking to either initially link to one or more of these portals or if you broke the story before them link to them via an update (you need to be quick) if you are in the first couple of links on a story from a major portal you can expect a level of traffic similar to many social networking sites. What’s more this traffic is highly targeted.

Cashing in

Well if you targeting news stories that are press releases for products (such as theme stores) simple referral links work well. It’s free traffic and unlikely to convert to long term readers unless you have spent time working on some good commentary (which in turn means with breaking stories you are likely to have missed the boat)

Obviously to take advantage you need a method of generating trackbacks blogging software does this automatically and CMS like Drupal have specific plugins.

Theme Forest - Case Study (how it went wrong)

So this was the point I was going to show you how with Theme Forest I got a few hundred visitors most of whom clicked through using my affiliate link and while sure the vast majority won’t be paying out I could look forward to a meal out for my ten minute effort….

Wrong.
Instead I had 0 visitors from Techcrunch, so what went wrong? Simple Nick runs another couple of sites on this server one of which is a proxy, which means we tend to have problems with Akismet and Typepad spam protection system. Unbeknown to me at the time all trackbacks are being thrown into Akismet hell from this server consequently the case study brought 0 visitors from Techcrunch though a few bemused passers buy did click the link probably wondering why I had suddenly gone uber spammy. That said it has worked in the past, even on a Saturday story being the second or third trackback has resulted in a couple of hundred visitors with direct referrals to the product nearly all those arriving on the site via Techcrunch and a couple of other sites have gone on to click through to the product mentioned in the article. Every time barring Theme Forest a meal out has been paid for (sometimes it might have been a local Kebab shop )

Is it right, is it spam?

The big news sites rarely are a good source for news they tend to present bite size chunks and not some in depth commentary that add to a discussion for many the only reason for linking to them is for the reciprocal link (though some nice minded souls at least give credit if the site was their source). The problem comes if your using them as a source of traffic you need to be quick, to be quick your not always adding commentary yourself. One tactic I like to use is “Live Blogging” this can get terribly messy but you start out with a skeleton post link through to your source then expand the post over the next few hours taking in more commentary and views. Depending on the type of site you are using your community might find this style of blogging confusing and frustrating though it can work well with the community supporting it.

Combining live blogging with Microblogging

Let’s take the idea of live blogging and mix in Microblogging (services like Twitter) if we generate a post with a brief article about what it is about, along with commentary being pulled in from a microblogging source the page can quickly fill with content. Rather then just pulling general comments from everywhere it is easy to setup a system where 2 or 3 “Authors” provide the commentary from their own microblogging accounts responding to each other to form the conversation, while if other people join in their own thoughts are vetted before going live. Combine with normal blog comments and not only do you have a non spam legit conversation going, but one people may wish to join in. Suddenly breaking news can create a new community.