Writing for traffic

If there’s a trick to getting schmillions of visitors without a huge marketing budget, I don’t know it. But I have found that posting worthwhile stuff regularly leads to a steady increase in traffic.

By “worthwhile” I mean articles that are worth reading now and will be worth reading a few years from now. You can’t always predict that, but there are certain posts I’ve found just aren’t worth it:

• What I’m Up To Now. In 6 months, no one will care. Translate these posts into some kind of lesson for the ages, or find another topic.
• Here Are Some Cool Links. Your readers of the moment might like these posts, might they’ll never get into the SERPs. If you say something worthwhile about webpages you’re linking to, that’s different.
• This, That And The Other. Each page or article on your site needs to stick to one topic. If you’re a blogger, don’t bother talking about several topics in one post because they’re all stuff you’ve been reading about lately. Write a post about each subject, and you’ve got several articles for the SERPs or other linkers to like. If you’re clustering topics because you don’t have enough to say about each one, find enough to say about each one.

There just aren’t any shortcuts that I’ve found. Every one you try, the search engine’s catch on eventually.

1. Coming up with new blog posts
2. Use Bloglines to speed up your blog writing
3. Project Mai Tai – Digg Traffic
4. PR and Traffic Building
5. Lowering standards

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