My answer was that while I could think of sites that could send larger amounts of traffic that one of my favorite places to get a link from was Lifehacker.
The reasons for this (in addition to it being a great read and it being an honor to be featured) are:
- It sends a nice first wave of traffic. The numbers of visitors from one of their links varies but it can be in the thousands over a 24 hour period.
- It is ‘nice’ traffic. One of the problems with sites like Digg and Slashdot (who can send ALOT of traffic quickly if you get a well placed link) is that there’s a certain element of users of those sites who have a rather cynical and snarky way of interacting with the content that is linked to. While it is a minority it can be a little overwhelming as the total numbers of their users are so big.
- Secondary Links. I don’t know their exact demographic but I suspect that a reasonable number of Lifehacker readers have blogs because the numbers of ‘secondary links’ (ie links from bloggers who find the content from Lifehacker) is quite large. This happens also with other large sites but for it’s size Lifehackers secondary link levels seem pretty high.
- Social Bookmarkers. Similarly I suspect that many Lifehacker users must be pretty regular users of social book marking sites – particularly Del.ico.us. My reason for thinking this is that when Lifehacker links up to one of my posts I notice that a few hours later it will usually appear in the delicious popular page. Often there is a flow on effect from this also including a third wave of link ups as well as other social bookmarking sites picking up the story (especially those that feed directly off del.ico.us.
In effect what happens when Lifehacker links us is a viral wave seems to kick in that can last for a few days. It might not be as spectacular as some other links that you can get but the impact is significant and I suspect has a profound impact upon things like increasing loyal reader levels and helping a site to become established in search engines.
Of course it’s worth saying that the impact of a LH link will vary considerably from time to time depending upon how they link up and what the topic is. Life hacker readers are obviously big on some things but not others and I’m sure there are other sites around in different niches that have a similar impact when they link.
