I check my traffic stats every day, being focused on daily blogging right now. I noticed a spike in traffic on Thursday coming from Stephen Fry’s Daily News and of course I headed on over to have a look. I found to my amazement & delight that I was indeed featured on the front page of the Stephen Fry Daily News and I captured a snapshot immediately. Here it is (click to enlarge):

Now, there’s a bit of a good story behind this, as I’ve been working through Darren Rowse’s “31 Days To Build A Better Blog” ebook, and on Day 2 the task is to “Write A List Post” so I did. As I’m so focused on business success, especially online business success, right now, I thought I’d do a more up to date round up of my favourite business books entitled “My Top 10 “Can’t Live Without” Business Books” and post that on my blog. Darren encourages us to come on over to his forum and let us know what impact, if any, we have with our List Posts but I thought I would wait a week or so, as my new post wouldn’t have had time to have any impact yet………or so I thought.

Noticing a big spike in traffic in my stats on a day when I had no Joint Venture mailouts going out, I clicked deeper into my Google Analytics and drilled down till I noticed that a LOT of traffic was coming from something called http://Paper.li – funny old domain name I thought.

So I clicked on it, and you can imagine my surprise when I saw the “Stephen Fry Daily” with me on the Front Page – stop the press! I shouted in excitement…..!!

Hahahah, sorry, couldn’t resist….love my own jokes as my long suffering family will tell you.

Well I enjoyed that traffic spike for TWO DAYS as the paper is only updated once every 24 hours and obviously my little post attracted some business people who follow Stephen Fry, as my subscriber numbers spiked too.

Then I thought, hang on, what fun, how does this work? Essentially Paper.li aggregates the content from the people you follow on Twitter (or you can create a paper around a hashtag you are interested in or a list you maintain). There is Google Adsense on every paper and with Stephen Fry having over 1.6 million followers that must add up to a few clicks on ads every time his Twitter Account announces the Stephen Fry Daily has been updated! I wonder if it’s just one giant clever way to create multiple Adsense sites – if so it’s GENIUS. Or I wonder if they are going to offer a share of revenue to high traffic “papers”?

Anyway, being a Star / Creator profile in Wealth Dynamics terms, I immediately created the Nicola Cairncross Daily and here it is (click to enlarge).

Then you choose to promote your own paper and every day, your Twitter account tweets out that the paper has been updated and people can subscribe.

Why would they bother?

Well, in my opinion it’s a much more accessible way to get a good overview, divided up into different catagories, of your marketplace. We are more used to scanning magazines and newspapers than columns of tweets which is what even the best aggregator (Hootsuite is my current favourite) delivers.

I’ve created The Internet Marketing Daily News and then I tried Business Marketing but that didn’t get any content (remember topic content is drawn from hashtags and nobody is using the hashtag #businessmarketing apparently). So I then created Marketing Daily but it was a bit non-specific and boring.

As I’m helping to look after her online presence, I immediately created the Heather Cairncross Daily News for my singing sister Heather Cairncross, using her Altovoice twitter account and lo and behold, it’s full of classical and jazz music articles as those are the kind of people she follows personally. Her blogging success rise and rise continues by the way, with the London Symphony Orchestra tweeting back to her just this week (she was tweetiing and blogging about singing in the Rogers & Hammerstein prom this week at The Albert Hall).

Guess this is where a good knowledge of high volume hashtags would come in handy.

Hang on, the Twitter home page has a live feed of hashtags – go and fill your boots loves!

As it’s the much-awaited (in our house anyway!) return of the X-Factor tonight, I’ve celebrated by creating the X Factor Daily News – well, I’m going to enjoy it anyway!

Watch out for my next blog post on Paper.li and why it gives you the most compelling reason yet for only very selectively following people!

A cautionary tale indeed!

Share your story of creating your own Daily News and get an immediate link to it from a Google Pagerank 3 site, by commenting and sharing your link in the comments section here.

p.s. I’ve just realised I’ve accidentally completed Day 7 of Darren Rowse’s “31 Days To Build A Better Blog” – how cool is that?

UPDATE : The Google Alerts on my name are still throwing up that this article is being passed around via RSS to other websites. Only today I found the entire article (with live links back to my site – fabulous!!) on TrendsCovered.com so I’m still getting loads of link love from this article.