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)
  }

If you want to make sure they (probably) don’t remove your profile, make it look as crap as you can. Search for myspace layouts, put everything, glitter graphics, songs, the works. Upload a picture of an attractive girl, get a few friends, get some comments etc.

Now you have a few methods to make some money:

• Use the groups thing to make a group in your niche. Collect people who have a similar interest to what you are promoting/selling into a group. Use their search function to find people. Only bother adding people who are actually interested or at least your target market in/for your product.
• Get lots and lots of friends. Use auto adders (Google for them, most you have to pay for). Don’t do too many at once. If I were you, I would set up 5-10 accounts now, occasionally login add 5-10 people. After a couple of months after it looks like you’re a regular user (not a spammer) then start mass adding. Don’t do too many, they do remove profiles that spam friend requests. Once you have all these friends, then send bullitens or send messages/comments saying something such as “Hey, talk to me on here”, here being a webcam site such as IMLive (affiliated link, through their company Pussy Cash. You can even get around $2 per free sign up there – it is easy money) etc.
• Leave lots of comments with affiliated links. Ringtones etc. Make it seem you are not a spammer.

A good way to get people who are interested in your product, is to do a google search like site:myspace.com “your keyword”

You can also get a load of backlinks, by spamming links on comments.

Let me know in the comments for your thoughts etc on spamming myspace.

It is, at least, one way of clever thinking…

Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, said in Technology Review that they have a new idea, to use a PC microphone to record a small (5 second) segment of your background noise, send it to a (Google) server, and then return a relevant ad.

Of course, Google will almost certainly be saving this data, along with our emails, search queries etc…

And because it is Google it probably won’t get listed as Spyware but personally I think this is just as bad as most other spy ware programs.

More on http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/03/google_eavesdropping_software/?

At Google, we’re constantly looking for new ways to provide effective and useful advertising to advertisers, publishers, and users. As part of this effort, we’ve been conducting a series of tests to determine where and how we might best bring value to print advertising. The publishers who display Google ads are part of these tests, and the ads come from Google’s base of AdWords advertisers. These advertisers range from global corporations to small local businesses.

See something you liked in an ad in the April issue of your favorite magazine? Just select from the titles below to view ads from participating advertisers. If you’d like to learn more, you can visit their site.

Google Analytics has offered a similar service for a while with its site overlay, but it doesn’t look anywhere as pretty as Crazy Egg’s heatmap (these do use different pages, so don’t compare the actual results…):

Google Analytic (left) vs Crazy Egg (right):

Read more about it at StuntDubl.