Generate traffic by mimicking other blogs’ best posts
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When a post from another blog becomes popular, it pays to learn why.
There are 3 things you, as an aspiring blogosphere overlord, should be thinking anytime you read a very popular post:
1. What are readers getting from this post?
- Are they getting useful information? If a blog’s most popular posts claim to be informative but consistently fail to deliver (John Chow … ahem), than we can assume the reader simply has loyalty to that site.
- Is the post simply reinforcing their beliefs? Political and religious posts always encourage flamewars and social bookmarking.
- Are they looking at naked people? I hear naked people are popular on this net thingy.
2. How did this post gain notoriety?
- Was it Dugg, Stumbled, et al? Then it’s likely this article format is very socially bookmark-able. Mimic it and submit it to the social sites.
- Did a popular site link to it, or has it had a more grassroots link building structure (e.g. many smaller sites linking to it rather than one behemoth site driving the traffic)? Mimic the good parts. Then check the trackbacks in the comments and let those people know about your work.
- Is organic search traffic naturally drawn to this post (e.g. the post is awesome search engine bait)? Get a piece of that action. Write a post using similar keyword structure and density.
3. What is the content’s style?
- Is it original content, e.g. a primary source, or is it a rehashing of other articles we’ve all seen 100 times? Sometimes it pays to be different.
- Is the content vague and open-ended? Does it present more questions than answers? This may be good for generating comments, but it sucks for people actually looking for hard answers.
- Is the content tight and refined, such as a short how-to list? How quickly did it deliver on its promise? Did it deliver at all?
- Is the content basically naked people doing naked things?
How to apply this analysis
A lot of blogs now list their most popular posts in the sidebar. Take a look at some of them and ask yourself the questions above. The key here is to break down the post into the hows and whys.
Using this type of analysis, plan your posts to achieve definite goals. Rather than just randomly spurting out words with no plan, try figuring out which demographic you want reading that post.
on July 29th, 2007 at 1:10 am
Maybe I’ll switch to an all naked people theme….
Hehehe… seriously, good advice.
on August 5th, 2007 at 1:35 am
It sounds as though I should perhaps consider posting more underwear pics alongside an article promoting some sort of religion… :-D
(Don’t worry…)