New Online Community Goes Viral In First Week Without SEO

Feb. 22, 2009 - PRLog -- Publetariat.com, a new online news hub and community for indie authors and small imprints, is already beating a path to the top of Alexa’s site rankings despite the total lack of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) effort on the part of the site’s developer.  

The site got over 7,000 hits in the first 24 hours following its launch at the O'Reilly Tools of Change (#TOC) conference on 2/11/09.  One week later, on 2/17/09, its URL was run through websitegrader.com and the resulting report showed a 3-month average Alexa traffic rank in the top 6.92% of all websites—a figure which, when adjusted to account for the brief time period during which Publetariat had been open to the public, equates to a rank in the top 2% of all websites.  What makes these results even more astonishing still is the fact that that site founder April L. Hamilton had only come up with the idea for the site one month before, on January 15, 2009.  In just 25 days, she’d taken it from concept to a top 2% Alexa traffic rank.

Says site founder April L. Hamilton, “I think the keys to success with the launch were a staged release, using Twitter to announce site development milestones, and recruiting allies very early in the process.  Beyond that, I think it’s the site’s content and community features that have continued to bring in new visitors and keep them coming back.”  

When asked why she didn’t pursue SEO options prior to the site’s launch, Hamilton replied, “To be honest, I’d focused all my energies leading up to the launch and immediately after on reaching out to the site’s intended audience of indie authors and small imprints; by the time I got around to thinking about SEO, I found site traffic was already so high that any concentrated SEO effort or investment seemed unnecessary.”

Since ‘community-building’ was the buzzword of the event at the #TOC conference, yet many attendees left feeling at a loss for how to proceed on that front, Hamilton has decided to document her process for building, virally-promoting and launching Publetariat in a new, 80pp book entitled From Concept To Community: How I Built An Online Web Community And Took It Viral In 25 Days With Little Money And No SEO.  The book will be available in various electronic formats, including epub, Kindle™, and Sony Reader™, by the end of the month, and in trade paperback in early March.

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Publetariat is an online news hub and community for indie authors and small imprints founded by April L. Hamilton. The site offers articles of interest to indie authors and small imprints written by successful indie authors and subject area experts, news feeds from major publishing news sources, a member forum, member profile pages and member blogs.