For the past two years he’s worked at Gawker, one of the world’s biggest blogs. Month in and month out, he generated more traffic than all of Gawker’s other writers combined. He just got poached away from Gawker by Whisper, a hot social networking startup in Los Angeles, where he will be editor-in-chief. Learn more here: http://hub.am/1fEhJVV
12. In November, his posts drew
17 million unique visitors for Gawker.
13. In November, his posts drew
17 million unique visitors for Gawker.
That’s more than 80%
of the site’s total visitors.
It’s more than all of Gawker’s
other writers combined.
19. 2) Cast a Wide Net
• Zimmerman monitors a database of about
1,000 websites every day, though he's
constantly adding new sites and dropping old
ones from the list.
• Every morning he scans roughly
500 posts to find the golden
pieces of content.
20. “I can tell just by reading the
title or a short description
whether a video is going to be
worth my time. Sometimes I
don’t even watch the video
before posting.”
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21. 3) Aspire to Inspire
• Human interest stories and stories that inspire
people “are the bread and butter of the viral
internet,” Zimmerman says.
23. 4) Play the Percentages
• Zimmerman posts 10-15 items a day.
Most don’t go viral.
24. “I don’t post anything unless I
have 100% trust that it will be a
success. But it’s a fairly regular
occurrence that I put my trust in
something and it ends up not
fulfilling my hope.”
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25. 5) Study the Data
• At the end of every day Zimmerman reviews
his posts and studies the traffic data, trying to
figure out why each post did or didn’t work,
and how it might have been improved.
26. “‘Why didn’t this work?
Was the headline too
wordy?’ There is a lot to
be gained when a post
doesn’t do well.”
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27. 6) Think About Timing
• There are two golden time slots where posts
perform best: 9 a.m. and noon, EST.
• At 9, East Coast workers are arriving at the
office and don’t want to start work right
away. At noon the same thing happens on
the West Coast, and the East Coasters are
breaking for lunch.
29. 7) Package It Well
• It’s not just about finding great stories. You
also need to choose a compelling angle and
write a great headline.
30. “If something can be
sensationalized in a certain
way to provoke a certain
feeling in the reader that
tends to do the best.”
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31. 8) Be Social
• Things go viral when they take off on social
networks and people start sharing them.
• Gawker promotes posts on its own Facebook
and Twitter accounts, but Zimmerman doesn’t
promote his posts on his own social profiles.
32. “Getting on Reddit’s front
page is still the best way to
inject a post with a burst of
traffic that, while short-lived,
could be of epic proportions.”
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33. 9) Be Patient
• Some posts don’t take off right away, but then
months later they will suddenly bubble up on a
social network and go crazy. Other posts just
build traffic slowly.
• Zimmerman’s biggest post last year was
about a reality TV star who made a sex tape.
The post drew 11 million views, but did so
over the course of seven months.
34. “At any given moment there
were 200 people looking at that
post. This went on for months. When
I write a post I ask myself, ‘Will this
keep going around on Facebook and
Twitter for months?’ My focus is
on playing that long game.”
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36. “A lot of people have called
me up and asked me, ‘What’s
the secret?’ The good news is that
it’s so much easier than people
make it out to be. I don’t feel
special in any way.”
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