Recently I decided to start marketing one of my projects with Twitter. Newsvibe is similar to Digg, except that it automatically collects news from most South African news sites. What I did was to integrate it with the Twitter API, and automatically tweet all South African news stories to Twitter accounts I set up specifically for the site. The main account is http://www.twitter.com/newsvibe. After I did this, the following happenned:
Traffic generated by Twitter
According to Google Analytics, I now get almost a 1,000 hits a day, compared to less than 30 before I started using Twitter. This is awesome – loads of traffic for free. I’m still figuring out how to best monetise and exploit the traffic. More importantly, I need to figure out how to get these visitors to use the site and start discussing the news stories.
#1 by Jansie Blom at May 28th, 2009
Very interesting post! And a classic example of traffic not being the goal. Having all the traffic in the world means nothing if it doesn’t convert. I think getting people interested in SA is even more of a challenge.
Sterkte!
#2 by Johann at May 28th, 2009
@Jansie Yep, it is a very interesting expermiment. I’m currently running Newsvibe as a hobby (it’s not costing me much), so I can try out different things without really worrying about the consequenses. I’ve still got a few ideas I’m gonna try out, will post about the effect they have.
#3 by Matt Visser at May 28th, 2009
Getting traffic is one thing, but is it the right traffic and what you do to commercially convert that traffic is the current hot topic for me. (and a lot of people I’m sure)
Awesome little experiment, worth watching simply because the news filter was created by a trustworthy source and the delivery of content through this channel could potentially save me having to go to all my news sites independantly. Plus the good stories, like cream, tend to rise to the top.
Nice post Johann, been missing free thinkers on the web and this helped
#4 by Johann at May 28th, 2009
@Matt Thanks! I created the site after I realised I was visiting loads of news sites every day, and it would have been much simpler to just visit a single site. And with people being able to vote for stories it makes it much quicker to see what’s news worthy and what’s not. Hopefully a lot of other people will also find the site useful!