Signing up for news aggregators online where your site is placed in the feeds of those most interested in your niche is a great way to not only get traffic, but boost your authority as a niche leader. Used well, these can send your content viral, and increase your website traffic significantly.
My first experience of going viral through a news aggregator, was Guy Kawasaki's Holy Kaw. My former site, Birds on the Blog was submitted to his Alltop site. I was meeting Kawasaki for lunch in London, and we were talking about Birds on the Blog, and I happened to mention an article my one of the contributors called the "The Truth About Men and Sex"
Arrow 1 = dark haired me, arrow 2 = Guy Kawasaki
You can watch the video here if you're interested...
After we had lunch (Diet Coke and Tuna sandwiches) Guy looked up the blog post and shared it to Holy Kaw, and then onto Twitter, and brought down our server with all the traffic he sent.
Now, not everyone can get an interview with the owner of a news aggregator and have the content go viral (but if you can, do it). But that doesn't stop you from submitting your site and seeing what happens.
Not every news aggregator will accept your site, so polish it up before applying to places like Google News. Other places you can sign up with Panda, Feedly, and Flipboard to name a few. I recommend you add your site to at least Feedly as a bare minimum. You will also find Feedly useful for keeping track of content from other creators in your field of expertise.
You will need to ensure your headlines are the best they can be. With the article that went viral through Holy Kaw it had a cracking headline. It evoked curiosity from men and women. It was written by a therapist so it was highly credible. It was perfectly formatted. I know because I formatted the 3,000 words myself! If the post didn't have such a great headline, if it wasn't written by an expert and if it wasn't in-depth I doubt it would have seen the 100th page of Google let alone go viral. Going viral in many instances is luck, but you can increase your chances of success!
Pros & Cons of Using News Aggregators
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This is something well worth doing, and do it before you are "ready". I wasn't ready the day the post went viral, but if i didn't have a post, then nothing would've happened...
