Last week, my interview on TextUML was promoted to the “popular links” category in DZone a web site to “share and discover the hottest links in the developer world”.

Dzone is quite popular among the developer community (the RSS feed for the popular links category has around 25000 subscribers) so you may wonder how big is the effect of having a link to your site appearing there.

The short term impact was spectacular. Just take a look at my google analytics stats for the days around the link. That day more than 700 hundred visitors reached my site referred by the DZone link (which represents a 300% increase wrt an average day).
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Unfortunately, a completely different story is the mid and long-term impact. By this I mean the number of people that discovered my portal thanks to the link and taht has become a frequent visitor of the site since then. This is very difficult to assess (there is no way to know if a new subscriber originally discover your site thanks to the DZone link or it is just a temporal coincidence that he/she joined the site around those dates) but if we look at the increase in the number of subscribers to the RSS portal feeds , my twitter account or the daily visits to the site, my estimation is that only a 2-3% of the original DZone visitors has converted into new portal followers. The monetary impact in my Google Adsense account was basically nonexistent though I have already commented the possible reasons for this in a previous post

Of course this is not bad at all and I’m very happy with the experience (which I hope to repeat again soon) but it is not exactly a life-changing event . In fact, I was already expecting this result since my previous experiences appearing in StumbleUpon showed similar results.

I just wanted to share this with you because when reading Internet success stories sometimes it seems that exponential growth is the rule and not the exception. Even myself, when I started this portal I was naïve enough to expect that kind of growth from the first day. Of course, now my experience is that only hard work and constant posting and dedication increases your base of followers.

I hope you have enjoyed this post and guess what? I’m now going to submit it to Dzone to see if people there find it interesting and I can get another 2-3% growth . This is the link in case you want to vote for it.

Remember that you can subscribe to this Software Modeling blog and/or follow me on twitter or through the portal’s mailing list . AND if you really liked it help me pass it ON TO others by bookmarking AND sharing the post USING the links below: