The Birth of an Authority Site

By Steven · Wednesday, May 9th, 2007

Ok, I’ve had a ton of people actually email me and ask me what steps I took to launch my case study. 

I didn’t do anything too overly complicated.

I pretty much followed some of the tips outlined in this post by Jack Humphrey called Top Web 2.0 Traffic Generation Tips and the tips in the Authority Black Book. Pay particular attention to the "7 Tips for Making A Web 2.0 Blog Post" on page 11. By the way, I didn’t even follow all of the steps…
(read the actual steps I took below).

So, why did I title this post "The Birth of an Authority Site"?

Well, you guys have been able to see how this site develop from the ground up, with the first post being written about a week ago. Prior to the launch of the blog, this page was a "squeeze page" getting roughly 20 unique visitors per day as you can see here:

StatsApril2007.jpg

Here are the actual steps I took to build this blog:

  1. Setup Wordpress and install plug-ins
  2. Setup an account with OnlyWire (I didn’t have one until now)
  3. Setup individual accounts with the social bookmarking sites available through Onlywire
  4. Setup a MyBlogLog Account and install widget on the blog
  5. Setup a PlugIM account and install widget on my blog
  6. Setup a MarkTD account
  7. Setup a Stumbleupon account and install toolbar
  8. Setup a Technorati account and claimed my blog
  9. Started posting content to my blog
  10. Tag the posts (for technorati)
  11. Bookmarked the site using Onlywire
  12. Submitted stories to PlugIM and MarkTD
  13. Submitted the individual posts to PlugIM and MarkTD
  14. Submitted the posts on Stumbleupon
  15. Answered questions in various related forums (with a sig file pointing to my blog)
  16. Posting comments (not spam comments) on relevant blogs
  17. Today I finally setup an account with Digg and Newsvine and submitted some of my stories (as well as others)
  18. Tomorrow I will setup a Netscape account and submit my stories (as well as others)
  19. I will also be setting up a Squidoo lense

So what happened?

I ended up going from 16 unique visitors per day to over 200 unique visitors in 5 days! Here’s a screenshot I took at 12:30am on May 9th:

StatsMay1through8.jpg

I have yet to implement any traditional off-page SEO strategies for this site and as you can see I am already getting a good amount of traffic.

Is this a fluke?

Nope…

I have been able to duplicate these kinds of numbers on four occassions now (although not as quickly, but within 15 – 20 days of publishing my site).

My advice: Just get started… write original posts and start participating in the web 2.0 space.

[tags]authority sites, authority site building, jack humphrey, friday traffic report, web 20, web traffic tips, seo, search engine optimization, website design[/tags]

Topics: Case Studies · Tags:
  • Remy
    Thanks Steven

    I have made the same observation as you that squidoo brings a lot of visitors. I am not sure it can be called a bookmarking site... For me, it is rather a kind of article database. From what I see, the traffic from squidoo comes from the fact that a squidoo page ranks very easily in Google, and hence gets visitors. I have not tried StumbleUpon yet.

    I have tried delicious, technorati and similar sites (pure bookmarking), and I got only marginal visitors from them. I have much doubts that a link from a bookmarking site has a significant influence on google ranking. I have monitored carefully my feeder sites and found that many links takes over a month to get in google cache. For me, it means that google does not 'like' particularly these pages. On the contrary, a squidoo page gets cached very quickly.

    The logical conclusion would be to concentrate on forums, squidoo and stumbleupon. I would also add wordpress.com and may be drop the rest...

    Anyhow, it is always interesting to compare results.

    Remy
  • Steven
    Hi Remy,

    Thanks for visiting my blog!

    Most of my traffic comes from Social Bookmarking and Forum Posts, and it's divided about 50/50 in terms of traffic sent to my sites.

    Some social bookmarking / social networking sites work better than other though... with my current favorites being StumbleUpon and Squidoo.

    Also note that authority site blogs will start to get a lot of search engine traffic for long tail keywords. I've hard the term "post and rank" bandied about, and I would say these types of sites do exactly that. It seems that every day I rank on the first page of google for half a dozen new long tail keyword phrases with a direct link to this site or indirect through my social bookmarking / networking sites.

    Hope this helps,
    Steven
  • Remy
    Steven,

    Your process mixes 2 strongly different methods to get traffic.

    On one side, you participate in forums and you answer questions with an attractive signature in blogs, yahoo or else. All these are known to be super top methods to generate traffic.

    On an other side, you place bookmarks and you ping sites.

    Can you give us an idea of what amount of traffic you got from bookmarks and pings. Intuitively, I'd imagine the majority of your traffic is due to the first method.

    Remy
  • Phil
    Great information Steven, any chance of you letting us see one of youf authority sites for reference like Tim G does? When do you think your report that you referenced be released?

    Thanks

    PR
  • What a find your article is! Thanks for sharing this step-by-step info with us. I shall certainly be follwoing in your footsteps to try to get the results you are getting. Many thanks
    www.thesecretsofvisualization.com/attractionrep...
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