*They do store all the content as well. I was just simplifying it

Just a short little post :)

Making a site as popular as Techcrunch is probably the dream of almost all webmasters. I was talking to a friend about this, and we were talking about how they became so popular.

So… how did they do it? And more importantly, how can you copy them to follow in their footsteps?

There are quite a few reasons, but i’ve gathered the top 10 (not in any order)

1. An easy to read and use design
2. Between 5-10 posts a day, always something for readers to read
3. Available in multiple languages, such as Japanese and French.
4. A tech (geeky) subject, and geeks love this kind of stuff, write about it in their blogs etc and thus easily raise the number of hits
5. Some of the best writing style I’ve seen on blogs come from Techcrunch. They employ people worth employing – not idiots.
6. Full time staff employed also will help by not only writing quality posts (see above point) but also helps them get exclusives and find news before other main tech news sites pick them up
7. Review many startups and new products, and get a lot of backlinks
8. Option to subscribe – thus again increasing readership
9. Likely that they bought traffic, like many big sites, to again increase readership and popularity
10. Nice and easy to read posts of quality length, with relevant pictures

There are possiblity other points (such as often getting exclusive news), but in my opinion the main overall point is quality content that people WANT TO read. Of course, content isn’t everything, Michael Arrington is very well connected and when he launched the site he got lots of good backlinks from other popular blogs.

For more information, take a look at his take on how he became popular.

• (the usual) take a high %  (or even 100%) of unique WITHOUT any referrer data (that also are not a bot)
• Make a “bookmark this” link, but make the bookmarked url something like “http://example.com/?camefrom=bookmark”. Then just do something like

• if ($_GET['camefrom'] == “bookmark”)
  {
  // +1 to your stats thing counting bookmarks (database? etc)
  }

Hope that made sense. More small posts coming soon

It is actually very easy, and is also a bit of a worry to domain name owners. Anyone can find out their personal data. It shouldn’t be, but it is used for spam and other illegal/immoral uses.

How to do a whois lookup

This is what it is all about – whois (“who is”). If you are on a linux machine, just type “/whois domain.com” in the console. Otherwise the easiest way is to use a website that provides a whois lookup service.

I personally always use whois.sc (now domaintools.com). You can just simply type in whois.sc/thedomainyouwanttolookup.com (this still works even though domaintools now owns it) and you get the whois record.

What if nothing is showing up?

Well, there is this thing called whois protection. It is free on some TLDs (such as .co.uk), but not on most. You can pay a company (usually your registrar) to basically put their contact information inplace of yours. This is often called whois protection. Emails sent to the email listed normally gets forwarded to your email address. If someone uses whois protection, there isn’t much you can do really…

• Keep getting backlinks – don’t stop just because you are in #1 position
• Make another page that targets the same keywords as your current listings, and try and get two results from your site on the first page. This will increase your hits by more than 2x.
• Update it every so often – keep it upto date
• Watch your competition – if another site is very quickly rising in rankings start working harder to make sure they don’t get past your rank…
• Get deep links – not all just to your home page
• Vary the anchor text for links to your site