What To Learn From Google Fast Flip
You may have heard that Google just launched a new product called Google Fast Flip. This is a web application that, according to Google, brings you “Blindingly fast overviews of headline pages of top newspapers.”
As a blogger, or someone who strives to build an authoritative site on the web, the part about Google Fast Flip that peeks my interest immediately is the “top newspapers on the web” piece.
When you start a blog on the web, what you are doing is creating a site that has the potential to create a steady flow of content. Google comes and crawls your site, and then people find your pages in the search results, and so on.
People can also subscribe to your blog through RSS feeds, email subscriptions, and other facets, so they can receive your content without having to physically come to your blog each time – or the way I like to look at it, feed subscribers are invited to visit your blog more easily!
And as a blogger, or published – whatever you wanna call yourself – your objective is to build a strong brand name, generate more traffic to your site, and become more authoritative in your nice.
Google Fast Flip is a site that aggregates new content from the most authoritative news sites on the web. But you know what I’ve found while scanning through the site? I’ve found sites like TechCrunch. Now would you consider TechCrunch a “newspaper” or a blog? I would venture to say that when they got started, they were what most people would call a blog.
And after I saw that, I started looking at the sites in Google Fast Flip as a resource and learning tool for me. After all, if you want to succeed at something, the best starting point is usually analyzing those who are already succeeding in your chosen area of interest.
So I browse through Google Fast Flip, not only to browse the headlines and read information, but also to look at how some of these sites are structured. Here’s a short list of some of the things I analyze when looking at sites in Google Fast Flip:
- Content layout of the site
- Advertising integration
- What Adsense ads are they using
- What other advertisers do they target
- How is the recent articles presented
- How is the homepage presented for easy access to older content
- Where are the feed subscription elements
- How frequently are these sites updated with fresh content
And so on….
Google Fast Flip is a great tool for those you, and me, who desire to build a strong online presence with their sites. I’m very intrigued by Google’s new product and I guess you could even say that one of my new goals in life is to actually be presented in their content – seeing my site flash across as people flip through the latest news!
Here’s a video of Google executive Marissa Mayer and team demonstrate Google Fast Flip, now available in Google Labs:
What do you think about my observations with Google Fast Flip? Is Fast Flip a good resource, as I mentioned, to learn from the best content producers on the web?