MarketingTheory.net

In the past three years as a technology blogger for JoeTech.com, I have noticed some trends in the kinds of posts that get return traffic over and over. Before saying what those are, though, I want to talk about why this is important to pay attention to.

Why should my posts be magnetic?
One of the first rules of blogging is to blog about your passion or something you can enjoy talking about a lot. Still, running a blog is a lot of work. While you should still try to post frequently, magnetic articles will keep even more new people coming to your blog every day. Even on days you don’t get a chance to post a new article, your old articles should continue to bring in new readers. And lets face it… Readers turn into profit and we all want to make some money where we can. Write magnetic posts now and enjoy larger profits with less work later.

How can I make my posts magnetic?
Making a post magnetic is mostly in the topic, but factors like the title, keywords and other aspects of SEO come into play as well. Let’s start with the topic. The easiest way to come up with a magnetic topic is to think of something that is or will be a hot topic or very useful to a large enough demographic. On my tech blog, I’ve written a few posts about how to fix a digital camera or a laptop. My two laptop repair posts bring about 60 new readers to the site every day. It helps if the topic is always popular, but the next best thing is a topic that will come up again and again. One example might be a an article on the Internet’s role on the presidential election. In America, that topic will see search traffic every four years. In my case, I wrote a post about a working proton pack on ebay. The device is from the popular Ghost Busters movies which hadn’t been in the news until recently with the June 16th release of the Ghost Busters video game. All the new game buzz is bringing 25 new readers to that two year old post every day. Working from my experience (and my Google Analytics stats), here’s some ideas for magnetic posts:

- Share opinions about a movie series that could go on forever like Friday the 13th did. Every time a sequel comes out, it’s free traffic.
- Write an instructional post on how to do something. It should be something not entirely obvious but not so daunting that few would dare to do it. Be sure to include lots of photos or video where it will help. (As a bonus, you can give short answers to questions on Yahoo! Answers and link to your post as the source)
- Review a hot product. I review a lot of products, and some of the more popular ones generate a lot of daily traffic from consumers. Take note, too, that this is valuable targeted traffic.
- Share thoughts on a long-running debate. You can make a lot of people angry if you’re not careful, but the more touchy the topic, the more traffic you’ll end up with. Just be sure you’re willing to back up your debate.
- Provide something fun or useful for a holiday. Every year, people flock to my “5 Geeky Ways to Say “I Love You” on Valentines Day” on Valentines day.

Once you have your topic settled, come up with a solid title that will not only be appropriate a year from now, but makes people want to read your post. Title crafting is a post for another time, as is general SEO, but they’re both important. Whatever you choose to write about, be sure to use appropriate keywords, etc. The more you pay attention to these details, the more traffic you’ll see coming in from all the search engines.

Capture and retain the new readers
Getting lots of traffic from Google is great, but if they only read the one article Google dropped them on, you’re not taking full advantage of this easy traffic. There’s a few ways you can make the most of this foot traffic:

Watch your bounce rates. Google Analytics is a wonderful tool that shows you stuff like this. If your bounce rate for this search traffic is 99%, almost every search visitor is leaving just as quickly as they came in. You want to get the bounce rate as low as possible. This can be done in various ways such as internal cross-linking, prompts to subscribe to your RSS feed, or a “releated articles” list. My search traffic has a bounce rate of about 85%. This means that about 15% of the people who come from Google, etc. visit another page on my blog. I have room for improvement, but 15% retention is decent.

Land the social media conversion. If you use Twitter, Digg, FaceBook, etc. (even if you don’t, but you SHOULD), make sure to provide links for the reader to Tweet, Digg, Stumble, etc. your article. A single Digg or Stumble can become an avalanche of traffic all because you made it easy for the search visitor and that person liked what he or she read.

Convert for cash. One of my popular articles is earning me about $50 a month with modest traffic. I added a highly targeted add to the post, itself, but only after I had a server-crippling swarm of traffic. Had I targeted an ad to the demographic ahead of time, today’s post might have been titled, “How One Blog Post Paid Off My New Car”.

Blogging is about passion for many of us, and it should remain that way. The tips and ideas mentioned above are not intended for every post, but from time to time, you will form an idea for a post and remember how making it magnetic extends your passion well into the future. Feel free to share a link to your magnetic post in the comments.