Our New York Times Mention: Blogs Generate Media Coverage and Drive Traffic Better than Press Releases and Static Sites Combined

Since Louise Story’s November 26th New York Times article that mentioned the Blog Business Summit, traffic on our site has spiked tremendously. We had thousands of hits on Sunday alone we’ve been getting major traffic ever since. Byron has had to increase our bandwidth limit. It’s been a bracing experience, and it’s a perfect illustration of why blogs have major advantages over static websites and press releases.

It’s likely that Ms. Story found our site through a Google search of “Business Blogging” or a similar search term. And since we’ve got interesting things to say, the blogosphere tends to link to us, which increases our Google page rank. That makes us more noticeable when a reporter like Louise Story starts working on an article about business blogging.

But page rank alone won’t get a reporter to stay at your site and read about you if she doesn’t like what she sees. You’ve got to have interesting content. Which is what separates blogs from traditional search engine optimization. There are no little tricks, you’ve simply got to earn your page rank through great posting, which attracts inbound links from other serious bloggers and ultimately gets you mentioned by the Times.

And once a major newspaper has mentioned you, the hit counters start dinging. It’s easy to see how you can kill two birds with one stone by using a blog. The same medium performs two very important functions as a communications tool. We’re not saying that blogs will replace traditional public relations efforts and well-designed websites altogether, but they will get you some additional media coverage. We didn’t have to do a thing beyond writing interesting posts to be mentioned in the Times. And in the immortal words of Bart Simpson, “that’s some GOOD SQUISHY!”

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