Notice something different? We just did a major overhaul on the content that appears on the ActiveRain home page!
Every day on ActiveRain we receive nearly 1,000 blog posts and questions from our amazing community. One of the biggest challenges for us is to find the most thought-provoking content and make it discoverable to the community at large.
Historically, ActiveRain has had a secret group of members who had the power to "feature" a blog post or a question which would prompt it to appear on our home page. The quality of these selections was amazingly good, but what always hurt to think about were the 990 other pieces of content that day might never see the light of day.
What Gets Selected for the Home Page?
On our new home page, we are looking to include a lot more content in the activity feed. In addition to our hand-picked (featured) blogs and questions, we are now including:
- "Popular Blogs" that receive a certain number of Likes
- "High Traffic Blogs" that receive a certain number of pageviews
- "Popular Questions" that receive a certain number of Answers
- "Popular Answers" that receive a certain number of Upvotes
- "Follow this Member" call-outs for people who reach the 200,000 point milestone
While we definitely want to be a transparent about what we're up to, we aren't revealing any of the exact formulas that surface content. The fact is, some of our point-crazed members will look for ways to exploit this new system so we'll frequently be changing the criteria.
How Do I Get My Content Highlighted?
The beauty of this new system is that so many more people can find their way to the home page. Here are the tips that will get you ranked:
Write Great Content - Hopefully, this was an obvious one for you. When you write thoughtful content that helps our community do their jobs better and live their lives fuller, we'll see "social signals" from the community such as Likes, Upvotes, etc.
Share It - Share your blog posts on Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networks. Get it in the hands of your peers and your contacts. When we see traffic reaching your content, we assume that you've written something worth reading!
Build Your Audience - We are doing a lot of work on the idea of Following people on ActiveRain. Here is your "insider tip" if you're still reading this post... START FOLLOWING MORE PEOPLE!!! We have some cool projects in the works to reward the people who are creating connections in the community.
What Happens Next?
We are going to be watching this activity feed in the coming weeks to make sure everything continues working as we expect it to it to. Will there be bumps in the road? You bet. This change definitely has some risk but if our predictions are right on the benefits to our community it will be worth it.
All of our team here would like to extend our most heartfelt thank you to our secret team of "feature fairies". Your work over the years has molded this community and your contribution is invaluable. We know that this is a huge change for you guys and it wasn't something we take lightly. We wrote some special rules in the code to make sure you are still able to suggest the best of the best blog posts to our community and look forward to having your suggestions fuel our Daily Drop newsletter.
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