Mashable.com

So just what is Mashable and why are we discussing it on a blog about Internet marketing and search engine optimization? Well, for the uninitiated, mashable.com is arguably the world’s most popular tech blog. They claim 1.8 million followers on Twitter and consistently rank high in the SERPs for virtually any technology topic.

Mashable.com also happens to claim some 40 million page views a month and they rank around 250 in the Alexa rankings. Rumors were flying for a while that AOL wanted to buy them for something like $20 million.
In other words, the reason why we wanted to talk about Mashable.com is because they are the Wal-Mart of blogs. They cover everything and get it out faster than many other websites.
They are also a kind of a “mash up,” (which is where the name came from). They decided to get together both social media and technology.
So what makes Mashable.com so successful?
They Were There First
Mashable.com started back in 2005 when social media was still dominated by places like Friendster and MySpace, neither of which had gotten to the point of being such a massive success the way that Facebook or Twitter is today. By being early on the scene and providing information people actually wanted to know about, they became successful.
They Post Often and Write Good Content
There are two rules about creating a successful blog that you must follow and they are reasons two and three for Mashable.com’s success. By the way, neither of them has anything to do with search engine optimization per se.
The first rule: write lots of content. It is not at all out of line to expect to post between 20-30 articles a week in order to make your blog a success story, all the more so today when the Internet is inundated with blogs (don’t forget that when Mashable.com got started, blogging was still a fairly novel concept).
The second rule: write quality content. You need to get backlinks to your writing in order to be noticed on the Internet today. The single best way to do that is to write quality content that people genuinely want to read. This way, they’ll choose to create links back to your content.
Mashable.com did both of these things and they did them well; so well in fact that they were one of the top 10 blogs on the Internet within one year of their founding in 2005.
They Are Current
Few things are as stale as old news. If you intend to write a blog which focuses on news, then you need to be posting right away about what’s going on in the world. Mashable.com understands this and they n now have an army of writers standing by to write about the latest trends as soon as the new breaks.
They Follow the KISS Principle
For all that you can make your website look all gee wiz beautiful with plenty of flash animations and other exciting things, Mashable has a very simple website. Why? It loads faster, allowing people to get to what they want to see that much faster. In other words, Mashable.com is so successful because they follow the KISS principle – Keep it Simple Stupid.