Mike The Internet Guy’s Blog
Just to be clear up front this link will not have any search engine value, but you might get some great traffic from it and find some future link sources. There is a company called Sphere that has created a Related Content Widget which displays related external news and blog stories on a web page. CNN is now running this sphere widget on their news story pages. Check this example on a story about Michael Vick. At the bottom of the story you will see an expandable section called ‘From The Blogs’. If you expand it, you will see links to about 3 different blogs that have discussed this topic.
I only had a few minutes to look into Sphere and I am not sure how blogs get added to their engine. However I did notice on their Feedback page that you can submit a blog through the form.
Keep an eye on the stories running on Sphere’s big publishers. Make a post on a subject that is relevant to your blog and references the story being published on the sites you are targeting. Then sit back and hope you get a link. If you do, get a link inside the sphere widget, watch the traffic roll in.
My guess is if your story is getting links from CNN and the other very big players Sphere has running the software, you will be getting some significant relevant traffic. So go submit your blog and let me know what kind of traffic you are experiencing. You may also find some new link sources from this experiment as well.
A question I would like answered. What URL is shown as the referrer from a sphere link? I would assume the original page but just want to make sure it is not a Sphere proxy of some sort.
UPDATE: It looks like you can also earn a link back from CNN by linking to the story. Basically a trackback, but a more roundabout way of getting one.
4 responses so far ↓
Brandon Adcock // Jul 30th 2007 at 12:19 pm
I submitted some of my websites, I’ll have to see if they get picked up. Good tip.
US Recall News // Jul 30th 2007 at 3:08 pm
Great post! I’m going to go and submit US Recall News and see if they get picked up. I’ll post if they do. Looking forward to hearing whether Brandon had any success either.
Rhea Drysdale // Jul 31st 2007 at 6:47 am
Excellent observation!!
Tony Conrad // Aug 5th 2007 at 3:53 pm
Hi Mike - thanks for noticing. We get a lot of emails each day from bloggers who get traffic from links we create in mainstream media sites. Sphere Related Content is live on over 1 Billion article pages across a number of high profile publisher sites like CNN, WSJ, NYT, CBS, TIME, AOL, etc.
The key to getting picked up is to write content that adds to the dialog on articles in our partner sites. We screen for Dup’s and near Dup’s - we actually penalize those type of posts because they try to game the system. Our semantic analysis tools look for contextually relevant content. Another great way to boost your ranking is to be a Sphere partner which can be done simply by adding the Sphere Related Content plug-in via WordPress.org or Feedburner FeedFlare to your site.
Thanks again for your post, much appreciated.
Leave a Comment