Make your blog popular - how to increase traffic

Most people write blogs for the fun of it, but many people also enjoy the feedback and popularity a successful blog can bring. WiredNews reports David Sifry's (CEO of Technorati) advice on how to get your blog noticed. Coincidently, NY Times writer David Pogue also has an interview with former Wonkette writer Ana Marie Cox, on how she became so popular.

Here is WiredNews rendition of Sifry's advice.

1) React quickly. Commentators like Andrew Sullivan and Michelle Malkin draw megatraffic with immediate rebuttals to A-list pundits at The New York Times and Fox News.

2) Make your posts easy to read. Italian comic Beppe Grillo broke into the Top 10 by setting his key points in boldface.

3) Link, link, link! It’s counter-intuitive, but the busiest blogs in Technorati’s index are those like Insta-Pundit.com that link prolifically to other sites. Linking works because most bloggers reciprocate by sending their readers your way.

4) Optimize for search engines. Put the name of your blog (even if it’s just your own name) in the main URL and the title tag of your site. On Technorati, identify your blog with search topics, like “politics” or “sewing.”

5) Post, post, post! Chinese actress and director Xu Jinglei has the most popular blog on the planet. At first we thought it was a glitch in our system, but it turns out she’s a real-world celebrity who makes time to post almost every day. What’s your excuse?

My take? I agree with all the points except the last one. Don't post a lot unless you have something meaningful to share. I think readers are looking for insight, perspective, and personal experience that relates to the subject matter. Anyone can simply repeat what they have read or heard...that doesn't help much.

I would add the following advice for blog writers.

1. Focus on a subject area that you know well. Provide insight, experience, and real life lessons learned.
2. Write interesting stuff that is balanced, thought provoking, controversial, and if possible, funny and surprising.
3. Become an expert in one area. Act as a filter or editor to find only the best stories that you and your readers are interested in.
4. Summarize. Be concise and clear.
5. Participate in the conversation. Comment on other blogs and leave a link. Talkback in response to news stories. Link to them.

The David Pogue interview with Wonkette writer Ana Marie Cox is a happy, lively conversation, with not much useful substance. I did find this one response particularly interesting;

DP: So what are the ingredients then for a successful blog, apart from being entertaining or snarky?

AMC: I think it’s changing. Six months, a year ago, I would have talked about what I think made Wonkette successful and makes Gawker successful, to a certain extent, and other blogs: A strong, defined personality with a sense of humor about themselves. An ability to filter news quickly and to recognize, you know, what is interesting to other people as well as interesting to themselves, and finding the balance between those things.

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Comments

[Andrew]

Don, you might want to double check your title...

Oh, and add to your list to carefully check the title of your post :)

[Don Dodge]

Andrew, great catch. The spell checker checks the body of the post but not the title. I have fixed it now, but for the record I wrote "bog" instead of "blog" in the title.

BTW, have you noticed that Microsoft Outlook spell checker does not have "blog" in its dictionary. It is constantly telling me that "blog" is a mis-spelled word. The new version of Microsoft Word does have blog in its spell checker.

[Lloyd D Budd]

I think the most important piece of advice is be genuine. Like in all aspects of your life be true to yourself.

The advice that annoys me the most is the "react quickly" because it is a major contributor to the echo chamber. So when I react quickly, I try to also make sure I am reacting thoughtfully.

[Andre]

This advice is good for those who 'stand on the shoulders of giants', in other words filter and add value to news from other sources, but what of the writer who generates his/her own original content?

Remember the recent Pew study that states that most bloggers aren't writing about the Next Big Thing -- what are the tips for them?

[Marjolein Hoekstra]

On your advice #4 ("Summarize, be concise and clear): I personally learn a lot from browsing through the Writers' Tools articles by Roy Peter Clark on Poynter Online. The quick list is here: http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=78&aid=103943, you can subscribe to the accompanying feed here: http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=78&aid=103943.

BTW, you may have corrected the title of your article, but the url based on the original title of your blog post wasn't adjusted accordingly. This is a known disadvantage of Typepad. I believe search engines index blog post permalinks, so when you notice that you goofed up in the first few words of your blog post after submitting it, you may consider creating a new post and resubmitting it to get the url right.

Let me know what you think. I'll follow this thread using coComment.

[Don Dodge]

Marjolein, Thanks for your comments and links to useful resources.

You are correct that TypePad keeps the original URL no matter what you change in the title or body of the post.

But, I don't think that the search engines index based on the URL words. They index the title and the words in the body of the post. They rank the post based on links, history, timeliness, etc.

There are LOTS of factors that go into indexing and ranking. The URL words e usually unimportant and many times unreadable, so they are not a factor. Otherwise spammers would simply load up their URLs with popular words to get better ranking.

I was director of engineering at AltaVista years ago and spent a fair amount of time fighting spam. The search engines today are very good at filtering out spam. I wish the email vendors were as effective.

Don