Techcrunch is ranked at #468 at the time of writing according to Alexa. They have been going for only a year or two, have over 150,000 feed subscribers (according to their Feedburner pic), and make hundreds of thousands of $.

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.