How to drive traffic to your site, the easy way

The Walker Art centre digital media team

Last week, i went to a presentation by Nate Solas, he is a senior media developer (he’s the guy in the middle, sitting down) for the award winning Walker Art Center, you see i’ve been attending quite a few lectures, meet ups, technology events, after all, i’m in Sydney and there is quite a bit going on, all you have to do is look.

I will share some of the interesting points i learnt from his excellent presentation

To get people to your site, all you have to do is write good content, so if you write something, make it good, people will come back to read more time and again, you can see this through the ‘Long tail’ of your site, i highly recommend this article by Chris Anderson, from Wired to get a deeper understanding of the long tail

Chris says:

Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.

A longtail states that there is more value in the sum of things that get small demands than on the big demand things.

It’s taking statistics to a new level, there is the longtail of travel

What a long tail looks like

Its the bottom line going across the bottom is what your aiming for. For the
Walker art centre started investigating the long tail, more specifically who these people were and what they were doing, they got to understand their business in a different way.

Whats interesting is recently Facebook changed their algorithm, the Internet has some new laws too, it favours stories that are based on good content, people will keep coming back and find content through search tools, good content doesn’t have to be on the sidebar, people will dig around for it are we in the era of digital archaeologists?

Nate talked of a ‘Long tail’, some might be forgiven for thinking it had something to do with cats, and it did to a degree, interested?

I watched a talk by Ken Robinson, in case you dont know who he is, Ken Robinson is a education reformer, one of the most interesting people you will listen to, he is also one of the world’s leading speakers with a profound impact on audiences everywhere

Ken Robinson

His TedX presentation has been viewed more than 4 million times (at the time), he said that his son showed him a youtube video of someone playing with a cat, it had 8 million hits, which was funny, but also true

What works in driving audiences to your site are, special interest groups. The Walker arts centre, launched the new site, it got a lot of traffic, they held a big rock concert, they got huge traffic, they held a cat movie festival, called ‘The nine lives of the Internet cat’, the graph went off the scale.

C is for….Cat

Continuing, Nate mentioned a few rules when you attract special interest groups, that he likes to adhere to

When you attract a special interest group, don’t make them look at other stuff, if they come for cat videos, give them cat videos
You need to Measure more and guess less
Stop inventing and start iterating
Do the obvious thing excellently
Give the user a sense of community, for the Walker Centre, they put the weather temperature on the front page and it’s been a huge success, people like knowing that it’s ‘Cloudy and 46 Fahrenheit’ around the centre
The Walker centre is happy to have links to other sites, it gives them credability too, people appreciate it and that brings people back

You can watch the entire festival cat videos here

This funny cat video has had nearly 49 million views, enjoy!!