What Are The Secrets To a Traffic-Pulling Blog Post?
By Anna Johnson on February 11th, 2010Internet marketing strategist Rich Schefren reckons he knows the secrets to writing a blog post that generates a ton of traffic. Indeed, one of his recent blog posts generated more traffic in one day than his blog got in the previous three months.
When Rich followed up with two more blog posts over the next couple of days, traffic more than doubled again, and engagement – in terms of comments – exceeded the level of engagement over the previous seven months.
So what caused the surge in traffic and engagement?
Well, I reckon that publishing a few blog posts and sending an email to a list of several hundred thousand subscribers notifying them of the blog posts was a major contributor to the increase in traffic! I mean, you’ve got to write a blog post to get traffic to it, right?
Nevertheless, Rich’s posts hit the Alexa top 10 most popular pages on the Internet at least three different times, so the quality of the articles also played a hand in the level of traffic and engagement he got.
Actually, Rich posted another blog post explaining why the previous blog posts were so effective (smart, huh?). Here’s a quick summary of my key take-outs:
- Do something different and unique – Rich’s Friday blog post consisted entirely of questions.
- Tease readers by asking them something they would likely want to know – this prompts engagement and gets them coming back for the answer(s).
- Participate in the conversation by responding to commenters – this enhances engagement and keeps people coming back to (and participating in) the discussion.
- Deliver what you promise – if you’re going to tease readers with a promise to tell them something, be sure to deliver on your promise.
- Teach people something new – position your blog as a place where readers can find out stuff they can’t get elsewhere.
- Promise posts at specific times and specific frequencies to ‘train’ people to come back to the blog at particular times.
- Give examples from your own business or experience to show that you practice what you preach.
- Link back to prior or related posts – this increases the time readers will spend on your website, as well as help people understand and therefore participate in the conversation.
- Incorporate blog comments from a prior post into a subsequent post – by highlighting people’s comments you show that: there’s an incentive to comment; it’s a dialogue, not a monologue; and you care about what your readers have to say.
