An Analysis of Sphinn: 175 Homepage Homeruns Dissected

Posted by Pete - 18/12/08 at 11:12:24 am

The following is a guest post from Tim Woodin. You can follow him at Twitter, and look out for his upcoming post on Michael Gray AKA Graywolf’s Blog next week

For the last three weeks, I’ve been keeping track of the Sphinn homepage. What follows is a disection of everything that’s hit the homepage during that time, including who hit the homepage, and categories the posts were submitted to.

Looking at the data

Here’s the data. Firstly, the users:

Username	Hits
BrentCsutoras	2
UtahSEOpro	21
chriswinfield	2
kevgibbo	2
lorenbaker	1
matthewdiehl	1
DavidWallace	2
verma.saurav	1
davidtowers	2
DazzlinDonna	1
bwelford	1
mercylivi	1
saadkamal	3
khalid	1
gyutae	1
planetc1	3
Avinio	2
skinner	1
AlhanKeser	2
bbcarter	6
graywolf	4
robwatts	1
rishilakhani	1
beale26	1
BrianChappell	4
Se1ySEO	1
eduardblacquiere	1
mpind	5
hugoguzman	1
evilgreenmonkey	1
Musa	1
Skitzzo	1
JackLeblond	1
TCSM	2
toddmintz	5
ViperChill	1
steaprok	2
rustybrick	1
TheNanny612	1
ZakNicola	1
Ruud	1
theGypsy	1
netgeek06	1
miketighe	1
EricLander	2
yetanotherben	2
mridout196	1
EddyDeMelo	1
Michelle	1
annie7	1
debram	2
ciaran	1
sammy	1
JeffMHoward	1

…and now the categories…

Category	Hits
Blogging	5
Google Other	3
Social Media	24
SEO	20
Google SEO	8
Online Marketing	5
Search Marketing	6
Usability	3
Affiliate Marketing	2
Google AdWords	3
SEM Industry	4
Paid Search	4
Other Social Media	9
Link Building	9
Google	10
Other	1
SEM	5
Sphinn Zone	2
News Sites	2
Other Search Marketing	5
Yahoo Other	1
Web Analytics	5
Google Searching	2
Networking	1
Other Online Marketing	1
Bookmarking	1

Analysing the data

Now when we dig into this, we can see that there are a group of users who basically treat the homepage as their own personal RSS feed *looks at UtahSEOPro*. However, the majority are submitted by people who have only hit the homepage two or three times, over a 21 day period, whilst 34 people have hit it just once. So whilst some people certainly have an easier time of it, it’s not a case that no new users can get there.

Looking at the categories also reveals some interesting data. Over 20% of all homepage hits have come from just three categories (Social Media, SEO and Google), most of the others are more equal, with only Search Marketing, Google SEO, Other Social Media and Link Building getting more than 5 hits (outside of the big three).

When you dig a little deeper though, you’ll see that the really big players all have something in common: they’re great networkers. Sure, everything that Jordan posts goes hot (out of 300 posts, over 200 of them have hit the homepage), but that’s because he only picks stuff that he knows is going to go hot. If you want a record like that, you’re going to have to be hard about what you choose to submit too, and have a large enough following to send it hot.

…oh, and please don’t just only ever submit your own stuff.

How to rock Sphinn like a superstar

If you want to kick ass on Sphinn, there are specific topics you should be writing on, namely SEO, social media and Google. Other than that, make friends and network, know who the big players are, and as with writing any piece for social media, know the audience.

Tim

December 18, 2008 |