Should You Publish New Content Frequently?

If you were to do this research, and I’ve done this research on a lot more than I’m just sharing with you… I’m just sharing a few of them, you can do the research, you can figure out what’s going on. I want to do just one more:

BusinessInsider.com. 21% of their traffic is coming from Google, 12% is coming from Facebook, and 3% from LinkedIn, I think that if you look down I think you’ll find that 20 or 30% of their traffic is coming from sharing. Now I want to do the same thing, I want to take BusinessInsider.com, and I want to put it into Compete, so we’re going to go back, and I know for some of you, you already know this. I want to make an illustration here for some folks, I want you to be able to draw some of your own conclusions.

So, BusinessInsider.com is showing about 32 million visitors per month. Now, if we go back to the top sites in the United States, and we go to the 5th page, which is #’s 100 through 125, you’re going to find things like WebMD.com, Gizmodo.com, Ancestry.com. We’re starting to get away from the tightly controlled, big, big niches, and we’re starting to get into more of the smaller niches: Feedly.com, AllRecipes.com, you know the #117th website in the United States at the time I’m writing is AllRecipes.com. WeatherUnderground.com is weather forecasts. There’s a number of other newspapers. Then we’ve got drugsreport.com.

What will happen, if you go to page 6, page 7, you’re going to find that these websites are going to become more and more specialized as you go through. What you’re going to notice on these websites is that these top websites have one or two big things that drive them. One is content, and one is sharing.

Now I want to go back to page 3. Remember that we said that about page 3: we start to see more content and less socially driven types of things. What I want to do is look at some of the social driven ones. I want to click on Groupon.com. So, actually, that’s not even socially driven, that’s advertising driven. You’re also going to find that even for that Google counts for a third of all of that traffic.

I want to go to AmericanExpress.com. Where is there traffic coming from? Ah, once again, 23% coming from Google, 6% coming from Chase.com, 3% comes from Bank of America, 2.5% comes from Facebook. What’s happening there? American Express has done a phenomenal job in the last few years of building what? A content oriented website, that has sharing components on it.

If we look at IMDB, today it’s number 28 in the top sites in the United States. Once again, we see that Google counts for about 1/3 of the traffic that they get.

Let’s pull one from page 1. An interesting one is go.com. #15 in the united states, I think that is telling.

I want to look at instagram.com, we think of Instagram as social sharing website, and the numbers will reflect that. #1, Google sends them 13.7% of their traffic. Facebook 13.5%, so very close because it’s sharing. T.co 7%, YouTube 4.9%, Twitter 4.7%.

What am I getting with all of this?

Remember it’s a social site, or a content site. 1/3 of all the traffic is driven by a search engine. I know I’m always saying, “don’t court Google.” We’ll talk about that in just a moment. I’m using this as an example, this is real life stuff. I wish it didn’t say Google, I wish it said Bing, or Yahoo, or it could be something else. We don’t find people trying to mastermind the Bing formula, but they still get into Bing. We don’t find people trying to optimize the Yahoo formula, but they still get into Yahoo. What we do find is people trying to game Google all the time. If you’re gaming Google, they just keep changing the formula.

Do you believe that Forbes and Business Week, and all the others that we looked at, spend 80% of their website dollars, trying to out game Google? I don’t believe that. What they’re doing is, they’re building a real website that people really want to share and Google rewards them. I want you to get that. Google rewards you for building a good website. They reward you for posting items on your website each day. Well how can you do that? You can do something that’s crowd sourced. You can hire people to help you out. You can spend an hour a day, you ought to be able to create 6 pieces or 10 pieces of content. It doesn’t have to be 700 word pieces to have news updates on your website, etc. That’s a different ballgame.