Bloggasm

HubSpot conducted a study recently with more than 1,500 of its customers and determined that small businesses that blog saw, on average, 55% more visitors than those that didn’t.

Why this is could be found in the subsequent data points: those that have blogs see 97% more inbound links, and 434% more indexed pages. The benefits are two-fold: Because of the fresh content there is plenty for other websites to link to, and with more indexed pages there’s more content for search engines to crawl and direct visitors.

With just a static page, obviously, there is little incentive to link to it.

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The online magazine Slate currently receives about 7 million visitors a month, but according to its editor David Plotz, only about 500,000 of those readers really matter.

“Until now we’ve been selling to the mass audience. Now once you have this abiltity to target you can really target your core audience… This creates strong incentive to create durable journalism,” Plotz said. “That one curious reader is worth 50 times the value of the drive-by reader. The person who makes a commitment to your brand, if you’re a quality brand….. if you can get those readers, a smaller set of readers, who come to you three or five or 10 times a week, you don’t have to go after that huge other set of readers.”

This is the philosophy I’ve always held with my own writing; focusing on niches rather than raw numbers. Very few within the PR and journalism industries are embracing the strategy of micro targeting, instead targeting only the Technorati Top 100 blogs. And while yes, it’s nice to be linked on those sites, I’ve found that in most cases they’re adept at sucking up traffic and don’t do much in sending hits your way.

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UPDATED BELOW

I just got off the phone with Adrian Arroyo at ActBlue and I have the official story of what went down since last night in terms of fundraising after Joe Wilson shouted during Obama’s speech.

1. Since last night, Joe Wilson’s opponent, Rob Miller, has raised $132,000 on ActBlue. About $100,000 of that came in the first 12 hours, and the additional $32,000 came in this morning.

2. The first donations started streaming in at about 9:30 p.m.

3. Most of the traffic for these donations was driven by Daily Kos diarists and Twitter users.

4. Donations are still coming in strong this morning, especially fueled by additional news coverage from mainstream sources.

UPDATE: Several days later, that number is up over $900,000

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UPDATE: I now have the official fundraising numbers for how much has been brought in since last night.

“You lie!”

The words were shouted during Obama’s healthcare speech by South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson, and progressives were not happy with the disrespect his words showed toward the presidential office.

So they took action, with literally thousands of twitter users linking to the Act Blue fundraising page for Joe Wilson’s opponent, Rob Miller.

So how much money have they raised so far? It’s now 11 p.m., mere hours after Obama’s speech, and so far $11,507 $41,000 has been raised in that short span of time.

Tomorrow morning I’m scheduled to speak with a representative of ActBlue and I’ll be able to find out more concrete numbers — where all that traffic was coming from and how quickly the money poured in after the speech.

UPDATE: Less than an hour and a half after I wrote this article, the fundraising numbers are up over $25,000 and climbing.

UPDATE 2: It’s 4:06 a.m. and it’s up over $41,000

UPDATE 3: I’m told that he has raised somewhere around $100k. I’ll get an official number when I speak to the ActBlue spokesman later this morning.

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I’m actually surprised it took this long

While this market has a lot of competitors, two big players dominate the space: Bit.ly (bit.ly) and TinyURL. For a long time, TinyURL was winning the war, despite Bit.ly’s advanced features. The game changed though when Bit.ly became Twitter’s default URL shortener.

New numbers from Compete.com (which measures U.S. traffic stats) now reveal a major development in the URL shortener market: Bit.ly has now dethroned TinyURL as the largest URL shortener on the web.

I wrote about the URL shortener wars a few weeks ago at PBS’ Mediashift.

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Many mainstream news outlets are beginning to pick up on a trend I’ve been noting here for months — that the Obama administration seems to be fueling an upswing in conservative blog traffic, mostly due to their blogs transitioning to the opposition. My research is referenced in this Fox News article on the subject:

Social media consultant Simon Owens said he found that conservative blogs had lost fewer readers since November. While the conservative blogs are now getting 37 percent fewer page views than during the election season, the liberal blogs have lost almost twice as many: 64 percent of their Web site hits.

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Robert Scoble argues that there is a gang of about 2,000 early adopters that flock to a new tool — like Twitter, for instance — and provide a breeding ground for mass success. According to him, it’s essentially the same 2,000 people, and though they don’t guarantee that a platform will take off, their presence is essential.

You see, there’s a gang of about 2,000 people who really control tech industry hype and play a major role in deciding which services get mainstream hype (this gang was all on Twitter by early 2007 — long before Oprah and Ashton and all the other mainstream celebrities, brands, and journalists showed up). I have not seen any startup succeed without getting most of these folks involved. Yes, Mike Arrington of TechCrunch is the parade leader, but he hardly controls this list. Dave Winer proved that by launching Bit.ly by showing it first to Marshall Kirkpatrick and Bit.ly raced through this list.

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