When the Cornerplay turned 100, I highlighted my 22 favorite posts. It feels much too soon to do that again, so for this milestone, will instead share what I’ve learned.
Google is king. That’s been the biggest surprise for me so far. The Cornerplay is syndicated weekly on TechSpot and e27 — two fine publications — primarily because as a casual writer, my objective is to be read. Yet, the largest referrer of traffic by FAR is Google. Nearly 27% of all traffic came from Google search and the next largest is 6%.
For example, Googling “the credit card information is not valid. please check your entries carefully.” will get you my article about Sony’s epic failure to process payments on PSN as the top result (as of this writing). I guess I’m the only person who wrote about it outside of forums and the like. It suggests long tail topics — especially those about consumer pain points that aren’t addressed — can generate enduring traffic from Google.
It’s depressing if you think about it. For publishers, it’s no longer about building an audience who loves your content and checks in everyday, even if via RSS or Twitter. That path takes a lot of time and money. No, if you want to become a business, it’s about getting Google to like you and send you traffic. Or becoming click-bait central and relying on Facebook to go viral.
That’s if you’re in the game of building traffic. Fortunately, I’m in the game of writing about whatever is interesting, so I can speculate what winning might require and then proceed to ignore it. Nevertheless, here’s more about the Cornerplay, 200 days in:
Technology refers to general industry analysis. Apps are usually reviews about websites, programs and mobile apps. Blog posts are self-indulgent, reflective posts like this one.
The most popular post on the Cornerplay so far is “Without these 9 changes, your OnePlus One sucks.” Which is interesting. My hypothesis: Google loves this article because its equivalent on the OnePlus forum received over 500 likes and links back to it.
November data is as of November 17, so hopefully this means we can continue to see a nice upward trend.
Countries reading the Cornerplay: 153 (!!)
Top 10 countries by readership:
- United States
- Singapore
- United Kingdom
- Canada
- Australia
- Germany
- Indonesia
- Malaysia
- India
- Netherlands
Spam comments: 24,486 (!!!).
THE CORNERPLAY 
You’e got great growth going on in your blog, keep it up. You said that you were in the game of writing, so that means you don’t mind the traffic. So did you do any SEO in order to achieve some growth through Google?
LikeLike
No SEO whatsoever.
LikeLike