How To Boost Traffic According to Someone Who Doesn't Get Much (Yet)

Sunday night, I got an invitation to join a site that gets about 15 percent of this site's traffic level. Well, I'm actually still interested in co-authors here, but other than the strict real estate and mortgages for San Diego site I just started at http://www.danmelson.com/, I'm not really looking to spend more time online. But this guy wanted to know how I had gotten to getting an average of 3000 plus visits per day over the last week in just under a year from start up, and here's what I told him.



Reasons to which I attibute part of the success, in no particular order:



1) I hang out with a couple political groups as well as the money folks. A lot of the folks who find me for one stick around for the other. But I link them and they link me. The point is is that cross-fertilization of traffic works. (pr0n probably works better than politics or money, but that's not something I want associated with my site)



2) I write regularly. Minimum of three good articles per week on money stuff, and I try to do regular political stuff also.



3) I try to always write something worth reading, and tell the folks something that the commercial drones won't tell them. Deal with more than one viewpoint. One of the reasons I get traffic is I'm not afraid to tell folks what professionals are good for, as well as what to watch out for in a professional.



4) I write on the "nuts and bolts" level, and I don't pull my punches.



5) I am not afraid to haul out the calculator or spreadsheet and let the chips fall where they may. My article that will publish Thursday is a good example of this.



6) Carnivals are your friend. People find you through carnivals. They seem like they were better a few months ago, but they still help.



7) I get very good search engine rankings because of how I write and how the site is set up (Kudos to Chis at Powerblogs). Probably half my traffic on any given day finds me for one article. Every time 100 people find you, a certain number are going to come back. I try to give them reasons to come back.



8) Don't try plonking the conversational elephants in the backside after they've passed on by. I got a link from a larger site for something I said on Haditha yesterday, but that's just plain dumb luck. Get out in front and dig a hole for those conversational elephants to fall into. Think of an angle or something original that nobody else is covering. If you don't really have expertise in the main subject of a topic, hit a related concern you do have expertise in. When Katrina hit, instead of talking about the damage and all of the issues with FEMA's response, I wrote an article on the insurance issues that would be raised. That article isn't anything like my most popular, but because I was out in front of the crowd, I got a lot of hits on it over the next few months. It still gets hits today because it has broader applicability, as well.



9) I try not to get bigheaded. I get decent traffic on the typical site's scale, but Dean's World gets over 10 times my traffic, Instapundit and Kos 100 times my traffic, and the big commercial sites 1000 times or more (Drudge is showing 12M today as opposed to my paltry 3k). The way I usually put it is that I'm trying to fight my way onto the B minus list. On the sphere's scale, I may be as high as C plus, or I might be a lot lower down. All depends what you think is worthy.



10) Writing a good article on an enduring subject beats the same quality article on a topic du jour. In the latter case, you get traffic for a week if you're lucky enough to get noticed. In the former case, you get search engine traffic forever, or at least until the underlying dynamics that cause it to be important change.



Not to mention all the usual stuff like Trackbacks, trying to be generous with links (folks will link you back), feeds, etcetera.