3 Important Things You Must Do To Drive Traffic To Your Blog

I keep coming back to this post, Ken, and debating it with myself. I don't need to argue in favor of the post; the post itself does that. But right now, I'm swinging to the "anti" direction, so I'll explain those reasons.

1. The web was, in the past, mostly lists of links to lists of links. In the 1849 gold rush, it was a lot easier to make money selling picks, shovels, and pack mules to miners than to actually mine for gold, so I understand the motivation to treat this gold rush the same way, but in this gold rush, picks, shovels and pack mules are darned near free.
2. You could make a lot of money by setting up a toll gate at the pass in the mountains, but the internet is flat. In a peer-to-peer situation, it's hard to get everyone to pass through your funnel.
3. People find your blog because they see your posting elsewhere and want to investigate more of your writing, OR they find your post on Amelia Earhart's hemorrhoid cure on google.
4. Those who live by google, die by google. There are only 5,180 pages about "Amelia Earhard hemorrhoid cure" (this page will soon be 1 of 5181) but getting to the top of the list is problematic. You either need other sites recommending you by linking to this page, calling the link "Amelia Earhard hemorrhoid cure" or else you repeat that term ten times in the page, including in the title, in H1 brackets, etc. Whew, that sounds unreadable.
5. When others link to you, you don't have to fight to keep that link at the top of the list, because people don't edit old pages any more, they just add new ones. Except google, of course, and as we all know, those who live by SEO, die by SEO. It's a constant fight, and probably not worth it, to do the SEO fight because we think the user is looking for Amelia Earhard hemorrhoid cure when they actually are looking for famous missing aviator's fix for sore butt, and it doesn't do any good to be at the top of the page of a search they never think to do.
6. It's a lot easier to keep a customer than to find a new customer, so you need to have worthwhile pages, made as readable and interesting as possible, so users keep coming back.
7. You need to have new content all the time, so people keep coming back all the time. One of the pages on my blog keeps drawing traffic from Google. It's about Giardia deLaurentis, the Food Network cook, and her new baby. Apparently, lots of people are interested in her, but I don't have anything more to say. All that traffic gets thrown away, unless the person finds my posts amusing, entertaining, and useful. Maybe they're interested in food. I have a lot of food posts. Maybe they're interested in hot italian wimmen. I have other posts about wimmen, but I don't particularly go gaga over emaciated teenybopper waifs.
8. People who like what I write elsewhere, such as in the comments of other blogs, seem to click on the links and visit my blog, Canthook, and many of those people start visiting regularly. I promote using a RSS reader, which makes it easier to make Canthook a habit. And some of those readers end up mentioning my blog on their blog, or ask me to do a guest column on their blog, which draws in yet more readers.
9. A boring title that encapsulates the blog post makes Google and other search engines happy - but because I write on a variety of topics, trying to make good entertaining writing the constant, it works better if I have a catchy title that intrigues. Did I mention that I post the titles on Twitter when I blog?
10. Twitter as a promotion tool is overrated. It's "write-only memory". Most of the posts are spam from robots. I tend to unfollow robots unless I am exceptionally interested in their posts. On the other hand, I tend to interact with non-robots. If you're not enjoying Twitter for itself, you're wasting your time, because nobody's enjoying you, either, and it's now exceptionally easy to unfollow people.

Oh, wow, a magical 10 arguments in response to your three. But I don't really have to convince you. You're the one that told me all the rules of communication that your dog taught you. Your meaty posts have me as a regular reader. The folks with 3 magical rules for writing posts with 3 magical rules? I sample them and I decide that life is too short.

I buy my bread at Alfred & Sam's. The bread is not photogenic, and it's not packaged in a handsome bag, but it's two thumbs up in taste and texture. I buy my milk from a farm on Martindale Road, in a run-down building that is, however, extremely clean where it counts, and the milk tastes fresh 2 days longer than milk I can buy in a store. I'm attracted to bright, shiny packaging, the same as everyone else is, but it doesn't take me long to recognize it when the packaging contains nothing of value.

I'm sure I am losing readers regularly, people who are bored with me, or mad at me, people who've died, or just decided to do something more productive than read my blog posts, but according to my server logs, I keep picking up more and more readers all the time, and the more readers I get, the faster my readership grows. There must be a certain demand for meaty posts with a catchy title - and I suspect that if one actually had something worthwhile to write about, instead of my meandering drivel, it would grow even faster!

Laura, I'm the same way. I prefer the "clever" titles and meaty content as well. But you also have to give readers a reason to click. It's a tricky one for sure! I've noticed that the most read posts on my site (and the ones that sustain the most interest over time) are the ones with numerical lists. I'll be curious how you fare if you try out this idea!

Good post, Ken - we've been discussing this much internally as well. My problem is that I have a tendency to try to be "clever" with my headlines -- assuming that after folks read my 'powerful' missives, they will "get it." I'm going to give your numerical recommendation a shot and see if we see increased clickage...

Always enjoy reading your stuff!

Great! That means, what, two people read my non-listified guest blog.