Breaking News! Eagles Linked to Top Receiver! That was the title of a post my cohort Pete wrote on our Philly sports blog on April 25th. We felt this was a worthy enough article to promote on some social networking sites, and Yardbarker was first in line.
What followed was an influx of votes, comments and traffic to our blog over the next couple days. To be exact 76 yardbarker votes, 11 comments and over 1,339 visitors and counting.
Now I’d be lying if I said we planned this or that I knew we’d get that level of response from posting that article on Yardbarker. But in retrospect we can dissect it and identify the factors to lead to its success so it can be repeated.
Headlines That Pop
There are 2 main things that made “Breaking News! Eagles Linked to Top Receiver!” a great headline.
- Newsy - “Breaking News!” Those two words immediately tell the reader to pay attention and creates a sense of urgency. That’s important if you want people to act (click through to your blog). Another tactic I have just started to use is a “Rumors” post. Now that the Sixers are out of the playoffs, their fans are pretty much sitting idly waiting for the NBA draft. Meaning there isn’t much active news on the team. So I am targeting my fellow 76ers fans’ tendency to jump on any recent developments surrounding the team, as well as stir up some healthy discussion.
- Hot topic - “Eagles Linked to Top Receiver!” This may well be the most talked about issue for Philadelphia Eagles fans. Not only that, but it is an emotional hot button that Philly fans have been pained over before T.O. came and shortly after he departed. In order to utilize this point you must know your audience. Otherwise you won’t know what they really care about. (More on this thought in future post.)
The Description Box
When I first saw what Pete wrote here I was like, “That was weak.” But on second thought it was actually pretty good. He again tapped into the emotion surrounding the topic by saying, “Has there ever been a team linked to more top-end players and landed none?” He asked a question which is a great way to create interactivity. And most importantly, Pete kept it short.
If you want to create a description that drives clicks, keep it short and don’t give away the farm. If you give too much information away, you lose intrigue. Without intrigue why would anyone need to read the rest of the story?
A Picture is Worth 1000 Words
Pete couldn’t have found a better picture for this post. (Note it isn’t on Yardbarker anymore because it wasn’t displaying correctly after a few days, but it was on there when he first posted.) To me the picture is a representation of the quality of the post and the site the reader is being directed to. If you have a crappy image chances are you have a crappy site, and people won’t bother. On the other hand, a unique image is the last piece of a traffic-driving Yardbarker submission.
We can only control three things: the headline, description and image. Yardbarker is a great way to drive targeted traffic to your sports blog. But you can’t just plop any old article up there. I typically reserve my opinion posts and rants for my regular blog readers. But whenever I get something hot, that has wide-spread interest in my niche, Yardbarker is the first place I go to get it out to the world.
That’s my best Yardbarker experience. What do you think? Have you had similar or hopefully better results on Yardbarker?
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Nice article, I’ve been using Ballhype mostly, but I guess I’ve got to get into Yardbarker.
Nice article. I just signed up for BallHype and have been looking around. I’ll give Yardbarker a try.
Thanks for the detailed article. I’ve been submitting to BallHype and YardBarker with mixed results. Good suggestions on how to get more traffic from YardBarker. I’ll try those out soon.
Thanks for the great info….Will have to try it out.
I had a couple successes but have lately found that when they start to take off, all the other blog sites just steal the story and the resulting views. Sure, I got a head start but they seem to have a lot of fans (self-made?) that bark their stories up much quicker.
Dannie,
First off, I love the site. I started my blog back in August and have seen pretty good success so far, and just now starting to get into optimizing the monetization. This is a great resource.
I recently joined the Yardbarker network as well, and one of your comments from above intrigued me:
And as further proof of my inexperience, I seem to have screwed up using the blockquote tag.
The line in your post I was referencing was: “We felt this was a worthy enough article to promote on some social networking sites, and Yardbarker was first in line.”
This did not show up in my original comment. My apologies for the confusion.
Jerod - I added you to the list in the sports blogger pack.
I personally don’t think every post a person writes is social media worthy. Basically I am saying don’t spam the social media sites. For one many of the users will start to notice that you are submitting all your own stuff and start to either ignore you or even worse start voting you down or burying you. Social media is for real news and remarkable content. Not your everyday type stuff.
If that makes sense.