I just read an article at Mashable about how a guy with a cell phone broke the news of the San Francisco Bridge being shut down after pieces of the bridge fell, using Twitter and Twitpic. It’s a different world! The same happened when the plane landed in the Hudson River in New York – Twitter, on the scene!
Why are Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, and TechCrunch such popular sites for social medialites and tech junkies? Because they all have an uncanny knack for capturing the news which is truly breaking. Then the rest of us sponge off of them for our second minute content.
One of my more successful stories along these lines happened around the inauguration of Barack Obama as President. I wrote a post about how Rick Warren was chosen for one of the two prayers, and the controversy this sparked in our culture. The topic just happened to be trending at the time on Google’s blog search, so my post sat at the very top of that page for quite some time, receiving hundreds of visits in a few hours from that one source alone. That’s the power of breaking news.
Here’s the downside. If you’re a one man (or woman) blogging operation, as most blogs are, you can’t break every story – it’s impossible. But the truth is, you can break some stories. Be there first and you’ll become a trusted source. That’s the power of trending topics. So watch Twitter’s sidebar, check out sites like Tweetmeme, or find sites that break stories in your niche and stay close on their heels. Write your own take on every breaking story you think fits and you’ll see a surge in traffic, as well as a surge in trust and authority.
Welcome to the real-time web, ready or not.
About Brandon Cox
Dude that’s so true. I had a group of friends at college that had a site that they managed to get onto google news where they would keep a close eye on breaking news from all kinds of sources and then re-write the articles for the blog. They didn’t exactly make a killing but they said that they were getting tons of visitors in surges. And that by the end of the semes their average views were becoming rather respectable.
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Yea, I remember during the 2007 Boston Mooninite scare, I was on the subway when everything hit the fan. As soon as I got to work I blogged about it on my personal blog and received over 10,000 uniques that day… it was pretty crazy considering I was averaging a measly 20 visits p/day at the time.
.-= Matt Savage´s last blog ..My Cougar Dating Story =-.
This happen sometimes also with people who spend lots of time on the streets capturing images and posting them through their cell phone!
I can say that breaking news is one way to get listed on search engines first and receive most of the traffic before others!