The DZone effect (how blog aggregation can affect traffic)

I recently used DZone for the first time to publicise my latest blog post to a wider audience. Oh my ... it worked rather well.

So im on blogspot which gives some nice google analytics for free which i look at now and then to try and see what is popular and being read by other people.

My blog is not all that widely read to be honest, it has a fair number of hits though, approximately 250 a month mainly coming from google searches, most traffic goes to a couple of my better/more interesting posts. But then i tried out submitting a post to dzone, mainly to see what happens.

The result was instant, i got over 600 views in 2 days, for me thats a big number, was it the nature of the post (it was a little provocative) and maybe the summary on dzone made people want to see what i was on about, either way i got a large increase in my traffic %300 :-)

Im not really hung up on loads of people seeing my posts, but its nice to know your are read :-) And dzone certainly seems to deliver.

The first fold

As with so much in the world the first fold is the most important, you get the first fold even slightly misaligned or creased and you can forget getting fold 20 correct.

Well like the other billion folk in web universe i thought id better get a blog, well not just that, i do think i have something worth while to share. But Ive never been one to read other peoples random thoughts and so you wont get read many of mine (as if anyone really would want to anyways).

Its just that i do come across ways of doing things (in a coder by trade) that is new to me, interesting and sometimes useful, and so i thought i might as well share them with people, and maybe if I'm lucky they will find things useful that i found useful, we'll see. Actually the most useful thing i find about blogs are the comments, some guy tells you to solve a particular problem in this way on his blog and you see 10 posts below discussing the pro's and con's of the approach, that's what i like, there is never just one way round a problem, i like to see the other side of the fold before making that first crease.