Tyme Said

Scrivs, Mike and I finished going through the Round 5 list. 1191 submitted. 134 so far have been accepted. Why so far? Because I have a large list of people I need to contact with questions. There were a ton of site we couldn’t reach so I expect them to contact me as well.

With every round I learn something. I learned in Round 3 what it was like to submit a site and be accepted. Round 4 I learned what it was like to go from being a member to a decision maker because I was Community Director by then. Round 5 what did I learn? Wow, well…

1. Going through the sites as a team is a better process (Scrivs, Mike and I made decisions together this time).
2. Unsleepable is by far the most used theme of those who submitted (ironically made by Ben Gray, a 9rules member).
3. Most people do not understand the value of proper navigation.
4. Dates are important, use them on entries.

I have one major piece of advice. Don’t write about the same thing everyone else is writing about. An example, Time picking “you” for the Person of the Year. With 200+ members that was being talked about enough in our community. Adding more sites saying the same thing would bombard 9rules readers with the exact same content, because there is only so much that can be said on the topic. There are people who strictly use sites like PopUrls or TechMeme for their news - and write about it. Right now AT&T is a popular topic. It’s everywhere. Don’t write about that. If you really feel obligated to inform your users, and you’re pretty sure they don’t look at TV, listen to the radio, and won’t see it elsewhere, then by all means write about AT&T. Or take another approach and talk about ethics or contracts and mention AT&T along with other cases, making it more your opinion than “I read about AT&T, this is great (or it sucks), read more here”.

Some sites are link directories for the most part. They have high traffic and they find articles of value and push their traffic to other sites. Other sites are content creators where the content can only be found on their site. Content creators make the content, link directories seed it to others can read it. WSJ is a content creator. Digg is a seeder. Many bloggers try to fall into a hybrid of “I read, I think, go here”. What is going to cause a reader to pick their site over the thousands doing the same thing? Picking hot topics is fine but be creative about it. This is so important I’ve added it to my list of things to cover on this blog. Perhaps writing an example article of a common topic with a different spin?

134 sites. I lift my champagne glass to you. Congrats - and I look forward to working with you.

Related posts:

1. Round 4 - it’s over
2. Round 4 - it’s over
3. 9rules is getting smaller
4. 9rules: Roles & Responsibilities
5. Who do you write for?