Sending out a news release to sites in your field is one of the quickest and effective ways of getting traffic to a new site. When I have a new article published, the first thing I do is send a news release to my news list. However, there are three news sites that won’t accept emailed releases, but will required you to do a little extra. This little extra is worth doing because if these sites post your news, you’ll see a flood of traffic. Who are they?
Slashdot covers “News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.” It’s basically the biggest geek site on the net. They don’t post many stories, but the stories they do post gets a huge amount of traffic. How huge? So huge that your website won’t be able to handle it. Being “Slashdotted” normally means a server crash or having your web host shutting down your site because he think it’s under a DOS attack.
You see, at any given time there are up to 85,000 users logged onto Slashdot reading the news. So when a new article gets posted, all these readers click on the link to read the full story. The problem with that is most people don’t have the server power to handle a Slashdot. The end results; your server dies from the flood of Slashdot readers trying to read your article. As the day goes by, your news will make its way down the Slashdot page until it’s moved to page 2. Then the huge flood of traffic suddenly stops, just like that. Slashdot has been described as an internet rave party. These Slashdotters come crashing into your server, makes a huge mess of the place and then leaves you to clean it up.
A Slashdot sends huge traffic, and traffic equals money. For The TechZone, a Slashdot means an extra $1,000 of income. Slashdot get tons of submissions everyday, so the chances of them posting your story are pretty slim. They’re looking for unique tech stories and news. They like stuff that are pro Linux and anti Microsoft. It takes a bit more effort to submit a story to Slashdot but if it gets posted, you’ll either be jumping for joy or cursing your web host for shutting you down. You can submit stories to Slashdot here.
Fark was started by Drew Curtis. The word Fark doesn’t mean anything. It’s a word Drew used instead of saying F*** in chat rooms and online games back in the early 90s. He became known for saying it at random intervals just for the hell of it, so one day in late 1997 he decided to go out and register the domain.
Fark post many different types of news, but the more out of the ordinary, the better. Each news link is labeled by the type of news it represents. The labels range from “interesting” to “Dumbass”. Less than 5% of submissions make it to the Fark front page.
I have never been Farked before. However, from talking to webmasters who has been farked, I can tell you that they can send traffic almost equaling Slashdot. To submit a news link to Fark, you must sign up for a Fark account. Then you can submit the link here.
Digg is a relatively new site – it was started in 2004. What sets Digg apart from Slashdot and Fark is that editors don’t decide what goes on the front page. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.
Once a story is submitted by a user it is instantly posted in the digg area queue. This is a temporary holding place where stories wait to be promoted to the homepage. To help promote stories to the homepage, simply visit the digg area and digg stories you think are cool. Once a story has received enough diggs, it is instantly promoted. Should the story not receive enough diggs, or is reported, it eventually falls out of the digg area queue.
Depending on a number of factors, it can take 75 to 200 diggs before a story is sent to the front page. Having your story on the front page of Digg will not send you as much traffic as Slashdot, but the traffic Digg sends will be quite large. The last time The TechZone got “Dugg”, we received 50,000 digg visitors. To submit a story to Digg, you must first create an account. After that you just log in and enter your story here.