This blog, Global Nerdy, gets referenced fairly regularly on Techmeme. In fact, it happened today:
In this article, I’ll show you how I did it, and how you can do it too.
Wait…what’s Techmeme?
There are still times in a conversation with techies when I’ll mention Techmeme and they’ll have no idea what I’m talking about. Simply put, Techmeme is the technology news aggregator, and a little while back, BuzzFeed News has seen fit to write about it and its creator, Gabe Rivera (pictured on the right). “I’d say Techmeme is still really a niche site,” says Rivera, but when the heads of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and LinkedIn read it, it’s the kind of niche that you want to be in.
Using a combination of site-reading automation and human editorial, Techmeme provides people eager to follow the latest technology happenings with listing of current tech news articles. It’s an ever-updating “Page One” featuring breaking tech news stories and commentaries on those stories, from big tech news sites to tech blogs (ranging from big, corporate-funded ones to one-person developer blogs).
Better still, Techmeme leads you to interesting places. Not only do the big tech stories of the moment appear on Techmeme, but so do stories that link to that story. As a result, you get not just what’s going on, but also links to articles that follow up on, expand, provide context for and even counterpoint to that story, resulting in a rich tech news digest. This unique view into tech news is why tech reporter M.G. Siegler wrote that only three elements mattered in tech blogging: pageviews, scoops…and Techmeme.
Simply put: Yes, you want to get referenced on Techmeme.
How to do it
And now, the part you’re really interested in: how to get some Techmeme Googlejuice and readership for yourself.
The trick is a simple one: it’s to get Techmeme to mention your blog articles in the “Discussion” section for its stories, or better still, make one of your articles a featured article. Once that happens a couple of times, you’ll notice that your readership will grow from the “Techmeme bump” and if you play your cards right, all sorts of opportunities will follow. It’s worked for me at Global Nerdy, which often gets listed in “Discussion” lists for Techmeme articles and has had a few articles as feature articles, and it’s grown from zero readers in 2006 to almost 10 million pageviews to date.
How do you get that? I gave away this secret back over a decade ago, all the way back in 2006, in an article titled Jason Calacanis Swiped Our 5-Step Plan for Becoming an A-Lister! It goes as follows:
- Go to Techmeme.
- Blog something intelligent about the top story of the day.
- Link to and mention all the people who have said something intelligent.
- Repeat for 30 days.
- Go to a couple of conferences a month. (You can actually skip this step.)
That’s all there is to it: find featured articles in Techmeme, write something intelligent about it in your blog (don’t forget to link to the article!) and keep doing it. Like a lot of other things in tech, as long as you’ve got the threshold amount of smarts, it’s all about perseverance.
If you take on this challenge, let me know how it goes!