The Effects Of Creative Content
04. Dec, 2008 
9 Comments
A Quick Social Marketing Case Study
On Wednesday I did my 5th big list and decided to have another go at hitting the front page of Digg. Last time I hit the homepage of Digg it helped me rank second for the term “Young entrepreneurs” in Google so it was well worth a try! Unfortunately I didn’t quite reach it this time with only 177 Diggs which use to be enough. I also didn’t realize that it was Thanks Giving on the day we tried to get on the Digg homepage which is most likely why I didn’t get so many Diggs.
Benefits of creating lists
I love making lists, you don’t have to have any knowledge at all in your niche to create one! For example, I could create a list about “Top 20 Best Looking Footballer Wife’s”, I don’t know of any footballer wife’s right now but all I would need to do is create a poll on a popular football forum or search the internet. Lists also bring in so much more traffic than another blog posts, In fact the last few days I have brought in 21,098 more visitors then last week just because of this list!
Creative Content Ideas:
“10 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Get Married”
“6 Quick and Cheap Ways To Get Drunk”
“20 Coolest Houses in the World Ever”
Twitter Effect
I haven’t ever used Twitter much for driving traffic but I did find it very helpful to gain Digg’s and Stumbles for my post. I also found that once one big name mentions it on twitter so did everyone else! Here is a list of clicks from the top 10 Twitter users, a lot of the clicks would of come from the homepage instead of their account:
We also got around 100 visitors from other related twitter pages.
Traffic Analysis
Traffic shot up by nearly 1000% as you can see my the bar chart bellow. Whats also great about Top Lists, they are actualy great content and its not a 1 hit wonder where you get a huge spike of traffic for one day but it carrys on for ever. Retire at 21’s most populer page is our Top Young Entrepreneurs page which receives more views then the homepage itself!
I am always looking to do new Top Lists and if you have any suggestions the please recommneded them to me!
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I have tried big lists and although they havnt been as successful as yours they bring a good lot of traffic and backlinks
– I dont use twitter. Is it something you would recommend?
Looks like I might need to make a list to help the launch of my site
Good stuff.
Tom: Twitter is great, I use it just to see what everyones upto. You can also get some great networking done and traffic from the site. Although I only probably got around 700 visitors from Twitter for the list, I probably got around 80 of my diggs because of it which is pritty impressive!
I always tweet my latest blog post, but it doesn’t help much traffic wise. Gotta get more followers I guess.
Good entry. Thanks for it..
When Twitter first got popular, I cheated with bloggin-ads and followed 7,000 twitter members
Now the account sits in the TOP 150 accounts and it gains followers each and every day. Too bad Twitter has put a stop to that account following new members.
However, a tweet could be powerful
-Mike
One my blog posts was a list and really exploded on StumbleUpon, bringing in 20,000+ uniques in one day and thousands more to this day.
The funny thing is that the list was pretty useless and took me a few minutes to make…guess it was just luck.
That’s real useful. Thanks.
I didnt realize “top lists” were so popular. I have done a few on my blog. Most were pertaining to article directories or top ways to get traffic to your website. How about the top 10 ways to make your first $1000 online? I don’t know…Im fishing for ideas here.
Great looking blog by the way!