Definitive Guide to Fark and Getting Mass Traffic

When Fark has the ability to send hundreds of thousands of visitors to a site every single month, I’m surprised that more people haven’t written about how to leverage traffic from the site. Perhaps the main reason is that people don’t understand Fark or that it isn’t really a ‘news voting’ community.

Nevertheless, there are ways to leverage traffic (lots) from the site that I’m going to show you today. First, let me share with you what Fark is all about.

Understanding Fark

Before you try to leverage any community, you really have to understand the ways in which they work to get the most out of them. Fark self-describe their content as “news that doesn’t look like news”. The name itself doesn’t actually mean anything, other than a replacement for the F-word online by its creator, Drew Curtis.

In 1999 the site received 50,000 pageviews, in 2000 it received 1,000,000. Unlike Digg and Reddit, Fark doesn’t use a voting system as such which I will go into more information about; looking at the homepage you can see a list of the top “news” for the day along with the logo for the source if it is applicable.

Homepage Content

As stated, Fark likes to describe itself as news that really isn’t news, and since I’ve had a few articles on the homepage of the site, to me, that makes total sense. By their own admission, less than 5% of submissions get posted to the main page, with the majority of the stories being funny / humorous and sometimes unbelievable.

There is some interesting information in the submission guidelines for users that would go against recommendations for using the likes of Digg and Mixx:

• Don’t capitalize every word like news headlines; write normally
• Make sure the submission is at least somewhat humorous
• Make the tagline funny

There are some quite strict posting rules that all users should follow, although this isn’t too dissimilar from other social news aggregators.

Benefits of Being on Fark

I wouldn’t have wrote this post if there was no benefit to getting on the main page of the site, after-all I’m all about covering ways to increase traffic to grow your internet business.

Take a look at the amount of traffic you can get from the site, this is in a one month period:

304,980 visits for just one month in 2008. That isn’t a photoshop or a typo, that is real potential to get massive traffic from a big online community. I’ve helped get clients over 550,000 social media visitors in one month so this isn’t a once off and very achievable if you have the time and resources.

One article on the homepage tends to send around 25,000-50,000 visitors as shown here:

If you look closely, the referring site is only Fark.com for one month in 2008. The figures on the right are no lower than 25,000 visits and the top figure is 50,000.

Regarding the quality of the traffic, I would say that it is very similar to Digg in terms of pageviews and bounce rate. However, the community does tend to come back a lot more after it has found a new resource. For instance, before the site had Fark presence nobody was submitting the content, but as soon as it made the main page a few times everybody started submitting.

How to Get Traffic

Now that you understand a bit more about how Fark works and the traffic potential the site holds, let’s look at how we can get traffic from the site. I recommend spending some time on the main page to learn the type of content that does well as there is definitely a niche that works better.

Looking at the page right now I see stories that are:

• Humorous
• Entertaining (they hold photoshop contests, example)
• Breaking News that is usually stupid / unbelievable

And unsurprisingly from their self description, that’s about it. Fark users want to read funny, interesting and entertaining content. If you are not providing that then you probably aren’t going to be able to get much traffic from the site.

In essence, it is similar to when only Tech stories could go popular on Digg; your story about politics probably wouldn’t have done so well. Although you might be thinking that it’s now no longer possible for you to get on the site because you don’t write humorous content, I think everybody has a chance.

When submitting a link to Fark you are given the usual options you would expect (URL, Title, Topic etc). There is also an option to enable voting, which means that Total Fark members (paid subscribers) can vote for your submissions. Your submissions need to be approved first by the team at Fark before they will be shown. Two quick facts to note:

• All approved submissions will be shown to Total Fark Members
• 5% of approved submissions will be picked to go on the main page of the site

Become a Top User

Just like most social media sites, the best way to leverage traffic is to become an active power / top user. Fark are proud to show off the top submitters on the site, although they don’t get any credit other than that as you can see from the homepage.

Your best option would be to spend time submitting humorous content you find around the web that you think the community would find appealing. Try submitting content from sites that are on the homepage a lot such as The Sun, Daily Mail, MSNBC and Youtube.

Once you are known to be providing quality content to the site, it is much more likely that submissions from newer sites are going to be approved and from there you have a much better chance of getting traffic. 40 below, the current top Fark submitter, recommends the Fark This firefox extension to make your life a lot easier.

Send an Image of Your Logo

You can also send in an image of your logo by emailing Drew @ Fark.com. Images are 77px x 27px and make submissions stand out a lot more if you are providing the image for a website you want to promote.

It might be a good idea to submit this image from an unrelated email address so it does not look like you are associated with this website. However, as with all communities, if you are providing a lot of value to them and being an active user then theres a much better chance of being able to submit your “own” content.

Create Funny Content

Just like a lot of linkbaiters will put a tech-spin on their niche content to appeal to the Digg audience, try to create some funny content that is likely to appeal to the audience at Fark. This is how the site in the Google Analytics screenshots above received so much traffic; they produce funny content on a regular basis and Fark submitters come along to post it as they have seen the site there in the past.

If you need help with linkbait, check out Lyndon Antcliff’s new program that he is launching. There are only 20 spots available so you will have to be fast.

In Summary

Fark traffic might not be for everyone, for others it might be too much of a stretch from your usual content to take the humorous angle on a regular basis. I actually love browsing Fark to give me a laugh and I really love the photoshop competitions; they have some incredibly talented designers.

As with all guides to social media sites, don’t try to spam the community. It doesn’t look cool and in the long run you aren’t going to get anywhere. I had an up and coming environmental blog with over 2,000 subscribers promoted to me via StumbleUpon by 4 people I respected in this industry for the same article. Needless to say, I lost a lot of respect for them and the website very quickly.

I hope you enjoyed the post and learned a little more about Fark and the traffic potential. If you have any further tips and are an active user feel free to share them in the comments!