Friday: 07.October.2005

Radified guide to Writing Radified guides

Began work on a guide to .. writing Radified guides. The guides here represent the site's most popular features. I'd like to think most of the site's 10,000 visitors come each day to see what interesting things I have to say .. but alas, statistics reveal the majority of visitors come for the guides.

The Ghost guide has historically been the site's biggest draw. Followed by the ASPI guide, the FDISK guide, the Guide to Ripping & Encoding CD Audio and the Partitioning Strategies. Oh yeah, and the Guide to Installing Windows XP.

••• continued •••

A good guide on a particular topic will drive much traffic to the site from all over the world. While search engine results definitely play a role, it's really word-of-mouth (via online forums) that really sends the hit-meter spinning. Cuz people tend to trust other users more than search engine results.

And now that the site has begun hosting (and paying for) guides written by former readers, I've begun to document the things I've learned over the years. Most of this info currently resides in the form of emails written to others. Indeed, this is how *every* Radified guide began.

But it gets tedious, writing the same things over & over. So, I simply copy-n-paste the info contained in emails into web pages, post them online, and *presto* .. instant Radified guide.

Search engines soon find them .. visitors start dropping links in forums all over the 'Net .. next thing you know >> traffic ^^^.

The site currently hosts the following guides (in order of publication):

Magoo's BitTorrent guide
NightOwl's Guide to Creating Bootable CD/DVDs
Magoo's Guide to Eliminating Spyware
Wizard Prang's Guide to Buying & Selling on eBay

It's impossible how to predict how a particular guide will do. For example, I thought NightOwl's guide seemed the niche-i-est, so I figured it would generate the least appeal, and therefore see the least traffic. I almost discouraged him from writing it. But, turns out, I was wrong. It is currently most popular of the four, generating nearly 1,000 page-views daily. Go figure.

I try to be a good host and periodically pimp the guides hosted here, and share with their authors the things I've learned, regarding how to improve them, and help them generate more traffic (which helps them earn more ca$h).

I've found that it generally takes ~18 months for a guide to reach maturity, during which time traffic will continue to grow, long as the guide stays current and doesn't look neglected (dead links) .. as search engine rankings rise, and readers drop links in forums around the 'Net.





Posted by Rad at October 7, 2005 11:24 AM

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Back-up your PC's hard drive with Norton Ghost]

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Back-up your PC's hard drive with Norton Ghost 12/14]

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Virtual Private Servers: Guide to VPS Web Hosting]

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Rip & Encode CD audio to high-quality MP3]

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Intro to Linux]

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Guide to eBay]

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ASPI Layer Drivers]

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Boot from a SCSI hard drive]