Publishing scoops and breaking news on your blog or website is certainly one of the most effective ways to attract traffic and backlinks.

If the news item that you are breaking is interesting, controversial or important for the people in your niche, they will certainly want to talk about it, linking to your article as the “source.”

So far so good, but how do you actually find the scoops and break the news story before other people? There are basically two strategies for this.

1. The Fast Tracker

The first strategy, which I call “fast tracker,” involves tracking the information that the companies and/or people will release publicly, and then being among the first to propose that information as a news item.

Here is one example to illustrate the case. Suppose that Google announces inside its AdSense Blog that AdSense accounts will start to required a valid credit card to be accepted. TechCrunch tracks that blog, and upon seeing that post, one of its writers immediately writes about it.

2. The Real Breaker

The second strategy, which I call “real breaker,” is about really being the first website to write about a specific news story or event.

This strategy is obviously harder to implement, but it also has larger returns, both in terms of traffic and backlinks.

On the first example, many people would link to TechCrunch, but many others would identify the original source and link to the Google Blog instead. Had TechCrunch being the real breaker, it would get all the traffic and all the links.

[ Source DailyBlogTips ]