a single source, nothing corroborates it

Start with the geeks even outside a tech niche

Technical communities sit upstream of what spreads everywhere else, so they are worth courting even when your buyers are dentists. A piece about flossing travelled because programmers voted it up first, long before the profession noticed. The rankings those sites feed are what the rest of the web reads.

The method

1. 01

   Seek your first traction from technical communities whatever your niche, because they sit on the networks that decide what ranks and spreads.

What it returned

• 3,500,000

  A post about flossing by Justin's reader Raymond Duke became influential in dentistry, but its early spread came from geeks upvoting it rather than dental professionals; the New York Times' Snow Fall drew over 3,500,000 page views, mostly from outside its own homepage, after scoring 512 points on Hacker News and holding the front page most of a day.

Sources

• Geeks as tastemakersJustin Jackson · justinjackson.ca · Why geeks are becoming more influential · undated