Ask HN: Why is Smashing Magazine so successful? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is Smashing Magazine so successful?

9 pointsguyguy3 comments

I have previously tried my hand at blogging, and though the focus wasn't design, but more technology based stuff. This was back in 2006-07. My projects never took off / gained traction.

Smashing Magazine started in 2006, Tech Crunch started in July 2005, and Mashable was launched in July of 2005 as well. These sites became pretty well known by 2008 to a wider audience than just design and news enthusiasts.

There are literally millions of people churning content, so what is it that is making these <and some other> sites so successful, besides content & being early players in the market ?

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They wrote a ton of top X lists about things that are highly relevant to their audience when top X lists were the thing to do. They have excellent SEO, and being an early player and highly linked to gives great Page Rank. They leverage social media quite well (I'd wager a significant amount of traffic comes from SM sites like Reddit/Digg/HN/etc). They produce a lot of content. Their content seems to be edited well, meaning it is well-written, well formatted, and usually not terrible. (I don't particularly care for it, but can see its appeal.) Lots of internal linked to and from related articles and a somewhat well organized site. They allow for readers to comment and they respond to the comments.

On top of that, they don't make any fatal mistakes. Their site does not take forever to load. They don't serve too many ads. They aren't on bad terms with any search engines.

"Top 10 reasons why Smashing Magazine is successful". They do write link-bait titles, but I rarely regret reading their articles as they are well-written and usually link to a lot of good, free resources.

I see a lot of sites that take SEO, Link-bait and frequent-posting of articles to the extreme and I think SM has done well to stay away from the stinky end of that market.

I follow Smashing Magazine.

They are successful because their content is helpful. Helpful to the point where people will link them on other sites to help other people. That's where the multiplier effect kicks in.

And they also publish their articles very frequently as well, which is why they can grow so fast.

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