Internet Business Daily

My site is back up on the new server, so no more downtime. Let’s continue with the posts!

This will sound very bad, but I have just discovered Fark. What the Fark?!? Yes, just discovered it. Fark, regardless of its’ pretty horrible design, is a great source of traffic, and has many quality links. Some have told me that Fark is meant to ridicule websites, and not provide a forum for quality links. I am still not sure about this fact but what I have noticed is that I am liking Fark more and more than Digg.

So what is Fark? Fark is somewhat of a Digg clone for less techy content. Some people say that Digg is a more techy version of Fark, since Fark has been around for a while. There aren’t as many articles on what the best sites for programming tips are, but instead more general and funny articles. I describe Fark as the Internets’ version of The Daily Show. Most of the articles about world news are real, but done in a funny way. It is a humorous site.

Besides that, there is one main difference between Digg and Fark: content that gets posted is determined by Fark rather than voted on by users. There’s voting on Fark don’t get me wrong, but it is not exactly what determines what hits the homepage. A few days ago I had noticed a huge spike in traffic to my site and I could not figure out why, because I had not dugg anything. I checked my Google Analytics referring source and to my surprise, this website (Fark) that I had never heard of was sending me large amounts of traffic.

The point of this post is to show people that to rely on Digg alone for traffic is not the right strategy. There a literally hundreds of Digg-like sites out there, which cater to every category of link submission (here is a list of all Digg-like sites). Some of my stories will do very well on one site, and then flop on another. Start to learn which stories do well on which sites and you will be a pro at generating traffic for your site.

To give you an idea of what does well on which sites, I will use my articles as example. This article about a simple Windows XP hack that my friend wrote did amazingly well on Digg and Reddit. They happened to both hit the homepage at the same time, which resulted in my site being down for an entire day. Simple cool tricks like this tend to do well on a lot of Digg-like sites. On Fark however, it did not get approved simply because it wasn’t funny in any way. This story was another big hit. It reached the homepage of Digg to later get buried (guess Diggers don’t like stuff like this) but did extremely well on Fark generating upwards of 6000 unique clicks.

As it gets harder and harder to reach Digg’s front page, people will be looking elsewhere for their social news. As a webmaster, I suggest trying all the Digg clones to see what does well for your site’s content. Use the site list given in this article to find out which sites work. There are also descriptions of what kind of news sites they are. Even if you don’t get hit the homepage, just getting your links out there helps your site as I always say.