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).
.
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 RSS subscribers, 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.
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.
FNR Pearl Chair. Head of the Software Engineering RDI Unit at LIST. Affiliate Professor at University of Luxembourg. Â More about me.
My colleagues @zef AND @ajlopez confirm my impression (WITH other sites AS well, AS reddit)
I FOUND the same WITH my blog… AND I still don’t ever bookmark or subscribe to useful sites that I find on dzone. I wonder if it’s the idea that if the author posts MORE useful information that it’ll show up on dzone as well? Could be a common mindset among users of these types of sites (dzone, reddit, digg, etc).
This spike IS especially valuable, even “life-changing”, FOR new bloggers. WITH my 5th blog post ever I saw a jump FROM 2-3 views/DAY TO 40-50 ON the DAY I submit TO DZone.
Hello,
Thanks for this informative post.
I am also using DZONE but i didnt get clicks and views to my article.
Do you have any suggestions to increase clicks and views
Thanks
Try first to actively participate in the community (voting others posts and not only submitting yours). Check also the topics of the posts that get popular to see what they talk about and make sure yours are in scope