Lately I’ve been reading a lot of blogs, but the ones I’ve really been studying have been the ones talking about building up traffic to your blog. Lucky for me, I came upon a blog by a guy named Steve Pavlina, and this guy has great content.
As a matter of fact, he wrote this post on how to How To Build A High Traffic Website (or Blog), and I have to admit that it was not only fascinating reading, but also a major departure from what many other people say about building traffic, or making money with your blog, which he has also written about.
Anyway, in the post, he gives his top ten ways of generating traffic, and the first 8 talk about writing. This post is long; as a matter of fact, one of his point is that in order to give great value, you have to write longer posts so you’re not wasting anyone’s time. Some of his posts are extremely long; I don’t think I could conceive of writing posts of 5,000 – 7,500 words on a regular basis, but I can easily see the value in writing longer posts. At the same time, from my perspective, I feel the need to entertain a little bit and show a bit of my personality, which is why I will post a superfluous video from time to time, or maybe a link to something funny or different (like this; it’ll make you feel good).
Still, all his points make a lot of sense. He makes a lot of money off his blog, and probably doesn’t advertise as much as one might think. Of course, he makes money from the rest of his website also, which I believe you should check out also, but he still shows just how much he cares for his visitors with the things he writes; it’s easily a blog I follow.
Because I’d love you to go read what he wrote, I’m not going to list all 10 of his points here, but I am going to list the top 3 because I believe they’re important enough to reinforce:
1. Create Valuable Content
2. Create Original Content
3. Create Timeless Content
Man, it doesn’t get better than that, does it? So I thought about this blog some more, and I feel pretty good about it for the most part. I think the mixture of long pieces (like my blog series) with some of the fun stuff works well for me, because, as another of his points will say, though I’m not quoting it, you have to be true to yourself and show people what you’re about.
Still, it does beg the question just how much could you write, on a consistent basis, if your living depended on it. If that’s all I had, I could easily do it. After all, I’m writing every day. This is one of three blogs I have, one of 9 websites I have, and I also write two newsletters of my own and three other newsletters. I’ve written one real book and an ebook, and have 4 or 5 others started. So, I could write easily enough. But consistently putting out articles of the number of words I mentioned earlier,… hmmm…
I’d love to know what most of you think about this one. If you go to Steve’s blog and read the entire post, you can’t write it there because he doesn’t take comments; he has so much traffic that it got to him, and he decided to turn it off. But he leaves it open for trackbacks, and there’s enough of them to show us all that people like his stuff. But you can tell me here; I won’t mind.
