I assume that anyone who is blogging wants to build traffic – increase readers. And if you’re blogging for business, not for pleasure, there’s nothing to assume.
But not all blog posts are created equal. Some get tons of traffic and some are ignored. Some ignite a ton of comments and some leave you wondering if anyone is out there.
What makes a successful blog post?
Let me share a story of one of my more successful posts to illustrate what you can do to create your own successful blog post, assuming traffic and comments are how you’re measuring success in this case.
The first step to creating a successful post is to monitor your traffic. After all, you can’t improve your situation if you don’t know where you are now. If you have a self-hosted blog (ie your own url rather than www.wordpress.yourblog.com) you hosting company will have some sort of tracking tool, maybe even more than one. But if you don’t log in and look at it, it doesn’t do you much good.
Now I confess, I don’t check my blog stats from my hosting company as often as I should. However, I am able to do an instant tracking of my most popular posts. Since I use WordPress for my blog, I installed the WordPress.com Stats plug-in. This little tool gives me an instant look at the posts that are most popular on my site. From the WordPress dashboard, it shows me the top blog posts of all time and the blog posts that are getting the most traffic currently.
My most popular post of all time is Can Baby Boomers Use Facebook for Marketing Their Small Business? which I wrote in March 2008. When I noticed that this particular post was getting a lot of traffic – and continues to get new readers – I made a conscious decision to start writing more posts about Facebook and social media. Now this also coincided with my growing enthusiasm for the topic but I might not have focused so much on this topic if it wasn’t generating traffic.
Recently however I’ve had another blog post that is getting more traffic and is rapidly catching up with my top post. Should You Send an Automated DM to New Twitter Followers? was written at the end of February and immediately got lots of hits and I won’t be surprised if it soon surpasses the Facebook one.
How did this post become so popular?
Write About a Hot Topic
First, I hit upon a hot topic. This was not entirely by accident. As I mention in the post, I attended a workshop at Podcamp Toronto where a heated discussion about this very topic took place. I knew some people felt very strongly about the subject so it would make a good blog topic. I also knew from talking (and Tweeting) with people, that many new-comers to Twitter were wondering if they should be doing it.
Tweet About It
Next, once I noticed that this particular post was generating a lot of traffic – and a lot of comments – I decided to take deliberate steps to promote it further. I submitted the post to a couple of blog carnivals to get some more traffic and in-coming links. Rather than just sending the initial Tweet about the post out, I reTweeted about it on a few separate occasions and at different times of the day in hopes of getting a different audience.
Who Else Is Writing About It?
I also began watching for other people who were talking about this topic. When I found blog posts by other bloggers, I visited their site, read their post and made comments. When appropriate, I quoted myself and included a link back to the original post (mine). At least one of these comments has been a significant source of traffic back to my site.
LinkedIn and StumbleUpon
I monitored LinkedIn Answers for questions about Twitter in general and automated direct messages in particular and posted responses. Again, when it was appropriate and added to the discussion, I included a link back to the blog post.
Added to this that somewhere along the way, someone Stumbled my post, which also brought new traffic.
SEO
I also did a little bit of SEO with the article, having “Automated DM in Twitter” in the actual title. If I had spelled out “direct messages” I think I would have done even better with the search engines. I also referred to the post in a couple of other blog posts with a link back (as I’ve done in this post) which also helps with SEO.
Overall, I didn’t spend tons of time building traffic to this particular post – most of it happened on its own. I just took a trend I saw and tried to capitalize on it.
Summarize
To summarize, I got so much traffic from this one blog post by:
- Writing about a topic that was hot
- Noticing it was getting traffic and deciding to work on getting even more.
- Monitoring social media to see who else was talking about the subject and leaving comments.
- Tweeting about it more than once.
- Submitting the post to blog carnivals.
- Using SEO trips and tricks (although I could have done better)
- Getting lucky by having others link to me and Stumble the post
Andrea J. Stenberg
Do you have promotion strategies for driving traffic to your blog posts? Leave a comment and share your secrets.
