An ex-mayor, 42DD breasts, Fark and Fox News

Seeing a spike in your website’s traffic is very satisfying, especially if you’ve managed to engineer part of it yourself.

I’ve found the news aggregating site http://www.fark.com/ is one of the best ways to do this.

Just about every news organisation in the world, including BBC, The New York Times, Sky, The Sun etc, send their unusual and quirky stories to Fark – in the hope that the site’s editors will choose their stories to appear on the homepage of http://www.fark.com/.

Only around 50 a day make it, but as each story is linked back to the original website the rewards - in terms of increased traffic – can be immense.

Within five minutes of getting our last story on Fark 2,000 people were directed back to our site - 24 hours later our story had over 60,000 views and nearly 200 Fark comments.
A pretty impressive spike for any set of page impression statistics.

Another advantage of Fark is that other sites pick up on the story and link back to the original site.
Our story has now been picked up by Fox News (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,321392,00.html) and appears on their site - so the visitor count continues to rise.

Some digital editors still seem reluctant to get their stories picked up external sites, especially if the only visitors they are likely to attract will not live in their newspaper’s patch.
But this shows a lack of understanding for how the web can, and should, be used – as well as a little naiveté. After all would print editors object if they suddenly received a request for 60,000 copies of their newspaper from America?

By the way, the story that got picked up Fark this time was this one:
http://www.eveningleader.co.uk/news/Women-cant-resist-squeezing-former.3653030.jp

And the title I gave it for the Fark editors was:
“Women can't resist squeezing former town mayor's 42DD breasts. "I don't know why he's complaining, he loves it really," says his friend. Yes, there's a picture”

Who couldn’t resist reading more?