Several weeks ago, I announced that Life Evolver was added to Alltop, a popular news/blog aggregator. If you haven’t visited Alltop yet, I’d encourage you to do so… Here are three reasons why:
Three Reasons Why Alltop Kicks Ass
1) They “help out underdogs and undiscovered gems”
Check out this graph- I’ve plotted the Alltop sites/blogs listed under the Lifehacks category, by their Alexa (popularity) ranking:
Compared to other methods of getting attention/building traffic, there just aren’t a lot of options for new bloggers. Google largely bases search results on the number of sites linking to your site, so this makes getting traffic from Google with a new blog very difficult. Getting to the front page of Digg requires that you have 1) A Digg-worthy post (usually a list of some sort, or a somewhat sensationalized story) and 2) A strong network of other Diggers to help you make the story popular. Again, this is very difficult for new bloggers.
2) The sites and blogs listed on Alltop are hand-picked, with feedback from the micro-blogging community
The Alltop about page explains, “The Twitter community has been the single biggest factor in the quality of Alltop. Without this group of mavens and connectors, Alltop would not be what it is today.”
Alltop is basing the sites they list on the wisdom of the community. This gives them a much higher-quality selection of sites than any automated algorithm could produce.
3) The diversity of the content under each category gives you a macro view that you can’t find elsewhere
This ties in with reason #1, but when you have super-popular websites, alongside brand-new unpopular websites, it creates a whole new perspective that you wouldn’t traditionally see. One reason for this is because the writers of those different types of sites usually come from very different backgrounds and write about very different topics.
Google couldn’t get away with putting brand-new unpopular websites at the top of their search results, because part of the algorithm for determining relevance is the number of sites linking to a site. But Alltop can put unpopular sites next to super-popular ones, because they are hand-picked by the community.
Thanks for your kind words! Glad that you like Alltop so much. We aim to please!
Guy
@Guy: Thanks for visiting Life Evolver, I love Alltop and will continue to spread word about it (=
Very nice article. Pretty cool that you also got Guy Kawasaki himself to comment on your blog! I’m a fan of Guy ever since reading his book “Rules for Revolutionaries.”
Hey good analysis on your new blog, mines new too, so we are in the same boat