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This is going to be a short post because while this traffic earner is often forgotten or overlooked, it’s a great way to get easy repeat traffic every year. It’s so simple that it’s a little bit funny. Just dedicate a good amount of time and effort to making a solid holiday-related post right before the holiday in question and watch as people return to the post year after year.

Last night, well-known blogger and photography tipster, Problogger tweeted about how he loves all the residual traffic that flows in this time every year from a single post, How to Photograph Fireworks Displays. The graph above shows that traffic and it really drives home what I wrote about last month, Discuss Topics That Create Magnetic Traffic. While you have to work hard to create a solid, useful post that people will want to come back to every year, the rewards are worth it and you’ll be reminded of that every time that holiday rolls back around.

Your homework: Think about the next major holiday (I’m thinking about Halloween already) and start planning a post for it now. Take the time to perfect that post and then publish just before the holiday for the best results.

Happy 4th of July, everyone.

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.

This short is going to be short but sweet. It’s short because there’s not a whole lot to say about this tip. It’s just something that I see a lot of people not figuring out, and it seems to escape even the Twitter elite at times.

The problem
What are people doing wrong, you ask? They’re using all 140 characters to tweet. I know what you’re thinking, but hear me out. When you retweet, your RT includes “RT”, a space, “@”, the original tweeter’s Twitter name, another space, and their tweet. This means that if your Twitter user name is eight characters long, combined with the other retweet elements, a retweet would be a full 13 characters longer than the original tweet. If your original tweet was 132 characters, when someone tries to retweet it, the result is a 145 character tweet and they’ll have to either edit your tweet using their best judgment, leave out your name, or just decide not to mess with it at all and not even RT. See the problem?

The solution
First, you need to remember to keep your character count in check. Just remember that you don’t have 140 characters anymore. In the example above, your user name is eight characters and a retweet adds 13 characters. So to be successful, you’ll want to try to keep your tweets under 127 characters or if you’re watching the “remaining” characters count down, don’t let it get below 13. Use abbreviations, acronyms, and url shorteners like http://lnk.gd to keep it short and be retweetable.

In the past couple years, there’s been plenty of speculation about the value of StumbleUpon traffic. Some have argued strongly in favor while others disagree. While I’ve always been in favor of getting my posts stumbled, I’ve been on the ropes about its usefulness. Today, I was poking around my Google Analytics account, and immediately noticed a spike in traffic on my other blog, JoeTech.com from 12.21.2008. A couple clicks later, I found the source of the traffic to be StumbleUpon hits to a post from last March. Looking back further, I noticed a few more spikes from StumbleUpon in 2007 and 2008, resulting in almost 9,000 visits. I love unexpected traffic, but good marketing requires understanding of methods that seem to work so I wondered, is this traffic even valuable, why is it coming in months later, and how can I keep it up?

Why the sudden interest in an old post?
4mind4life “discovered” my post about a Swiss Mini Gun back on March 6th. A couple days later, someone else stumbled it and the post was viewed just over 200 times. Then it quickly faded into the darkness of my blog archives. More people stumbled it, but it takes someone with plenty of subscribers to get a burst of traffic to your post, so it sat silent until it got stumbled by another “power user” on April 9th, bringing me an additional 300+ views. Quietly, the post lay in the archives for months after that initial traffic, averaging about 5 views per day, from Google and other sources. In late November, it had a couple small traffic bumps, leading another power Stumbler to find the post and stumble it. That stumble resulted in a new 200+ views burst of traffic. These bursts of traffic from power users stumbling your content are why many social media experts tell you to invest time making connections with the right people on StumbleUpon and other social media sites, something I need to do more of, admittedly.

Is this traffic even valuable?
This is another point of contention when it comes to sites like StumbleUpon. Ultimately, any traffic that isn’t someone just trying to bury your web server is good traffic. When I look at the bounce rates below for my SU traffic, they’re not bad, but they’re not great, either. This means about 48% of the people who came to my site from StumbleUpon walked right back out. But I’m a “glass half full” type of guy, so I see that 52% of these new visitors decided to drop back in later and read other posts. This means StumbleUpon has brought me about 4,300 new readers that ended up coming back. That’s not too bad for free traffic.

I also see 1.73 pages per visit on average, which is great. It means that about 73% of these new visitors checked out another page on the site before they left. I’d love a much higher number, but once again, all I’ve done to get this free traffic is add a StumbleUpon link to my posts. Better still, I’m sure a couple of these visitors also stumbled the second post they read. StumbleUpon traffic, in my opinion, is very valuable. If you’re not taking advantage of it, you should.

How do I make it happen more?
I’ve already pointed out part of this above. If you want to succeed with social marketing, you should be social. These sites rely on people suggesting things for other people to view and read, so you need those first few stumbles to get the ball rolling. While I’ve been a horrible slacker on StumbleUpon, I tried some social participation on Digg, which works on a similar principal, with some degree of success. When you join the site, make sure your blog’s URL is in your profile and add an icon so you’ll be noticeable. Next, find a tag related to the type of content you regularly post. Pick a popular (more bold) one for better results.

Don’t stop there. Working to get those initial stumbles is just the door-opener. The real power behind StumbleUpon is the viral effect it can have. If each person who sees the initial stumbles stumbles the post themselves, the traffic momentum will continue to grow. There’s no way to make sure this happens, but you can certainly increase your odds. Put a StumbleUpon link at the bottom of your post, making it easy for anyone to stumble it. The easier you make it, the more success you’ll see.

If you want to really remind those stumblers to re-stumble your post, do like Saad Kamal did in this post and display a special message to people that came from stumbleupon.com, asking them to stumble your post.

Targeting a stumble request like this is a great way to take advantage of the ability to know where the reader is coming from. This works for other services like Digg, etc., too. Check out this plugin if you’re using WordPress.

Be worthy of stumbles
Just like Digg or any other social media traffic engine, StumbleUpon has users that generally promote specific types of stories, images, etc. over others. Most bloggers should write about what makes them happy and in a way they are comfortable with, but if you need a big traffic boost, take a look at what others are stumbling and gear a post to it. Digg, for example, loves lists like “10 reasons you should…” or “5 ways to get… for free”. Take a look at what the power users like and give it to them. Chances are, they’ll stumble it and you’ll have some instant traffic.