John LoGioco.com

Duncan's 3 keys to success with redesigned INQUISITR

Yesterday Duncan Riley launched a new look for his blog INQUISITR.  Aside from growing INQUISITR in a short period of time to break the web's top 1000 sites, Duncan is doing 3 things that are right for publishers in today's changing environment;

1.)  Loud - Bold - Easy Headlines:
You can see INQUISITR's headlines from across the hall let alone in front of a computer or on a phone.  Big, bold and easy to read headlines makes it easy on a reader to scan, identify and link to what's interesting.  Compare this format to most any large publishers site and the difference is clear.

 

2.)  Link Out & Prosper:
Duncan is not afraid to offer his readers links to outside content that may be topical or targeted.  Duncan has been using outbrain for providing readers with targeted links at the footer of each post.  Some of those links are to his own content and some are not.  (Full disclosure - I am the VP of biz dev @ outbrain and Duncan & INQUISITR is a client).  Publishers like Duncan know by looking at the data that serving relevant, external links helps to boost traffic, not decrease traffic.  Additionally, he also announced a launch partnership with ReadBurner to show topical links based on what people are talking about and sharing on the social nets.  Congrats to Adam Ostrow and team for the launch and getting the deal with Duncan. 

 

3.)  Images with Headlines:
Everyone likes a picture to go with the words, and INQUISITR is doing just that.  Images that accompany stories give the reader a quick visual checkpoint about the content and for speeder viewers who don't read headlines, images offer another tool to invite a click.  Glancing at an image is faster than reading a headline, so images can help catch the speediest of consumers. 

Way to go Duncan.  The re-design looks great and we look forward to seeing INQUISITR rise further.

idea for Compete: explain traffic spikes with links to news stories

Ok so I do use compete.com for placing sites is some context.  I know it's    not laser sharp but I do find it useful for categorization and comparison.  But, they can really leave you wondering why companies see such spikes in traffic.  So my suggestion to compete is to call googles's blog/news search api for the potential news that may have broken around the times/days of significant +/- traffic spikes.  The idea is to search and list any relevant posts about the company from notable sources that may have caused the spikes in traffic.  My guess is that this will help explain a good bit of the spikes I see.  Here's an example of a company called Gigpark.com.  They have a significant upward spike around May.  After looking on google blog search I found a post from techcrunch on May 23rd.  Funny - that's right around the time of the spike.   More importantly this would lend more credibility to compete's data and if you are in the data business, credibility is everything.

here's the compete graph complete with *unexplained* spike in traffic:

Here's the post from techcrunch that most likely caused this spike;