Blog tips: Lessons learned from our first 100 posts

We have officially crossed over into adulthood (well, adolescence anyway) with our blog post total hitting triple digits with this very post. 

Our first 100 posts have been a constant learning experience. Reflecting back on our ups and downs, hindsight reveals what has and hasn’t worked for us in connecting with web surfers.
Here are 5 blogging tips for creating relevant content and getting people to read it. 

Exploit unexpected traffic sources
We’ve had a couple of surprisingly effective sources that almost always give us a slew of hits with each post. One of these is StumbleUpon, which by itself has delivered hundreds of hits within a few hours of publishing posts. We’re still not sure why some posts take off while others fizzle, but consistently working with StumbleUpon has paid off, and we’ve had a similar experience with Reddit. We’ve also gotten consistent search engine traffic from unexpected keywords. Track closely where readers are coming from and play up what’s working.

Stay on top of current events
This is pretty obvious, but don’t underestimate just how much traffic trending topics can generate. Your blog’s focus may not be on breaking news (ours isn’t), but big things will happen every now and then in your field and it’s a good idea to capitalize on them. Some of our biggest traffic days were thanks to quick responses to breaking events (like the launch of Apple’s iPad) thus adding to our overall reader base. Just keep in mind how short the window is on these topics – it may only be a day or two. The internet has a very short attention span.

Don’t neglect SEO for your blog
With their frequently updated content and high flexibility, blogs are SEO gold mines. You can easily write posts on the fly about hot topics that are generating hoards of searches, you have a lot of great content to share with others to get in-links and have an ideal place to create in-links to your other web properties or sites you want to share link power with. All theses things can be difficult to manage with your main website, especially if its content is pretty locked in place. If you don’t have a blog, SEO is a great reason to start one.

Make yourself useful
Advice lists have been a big hit for us. Sure, breaking news and offering opinions on topics our readers care about has gotten surges of traffic, but those posts haven’t had the engagement or consistent performance of our specific advice pieces. A mixture of both is ideal as you don’t want to get monotonous, but always bear in mind people have limited time to surf blogs and will only stop to read something they know will give them something back for their time. Be highly critical in your editorial process. 

Create a schedule and stick to it
The frequency of your posts is vital for both search engine ranking and keeping your blog top of mind in readers. It may seem against the nature of a blog to create a rigid structure for posting, but for all you busy bees it’s probably the only realistic way to make sure you’ve got content going up on a regular basis over the long term. We couldn’t have kept on as consistently as we have without giving ourselves hard deadlines. 

Check back to bask in the wisdom we’ve gained in our 1,000th post special. Shouldn’t take too long. To commemorate our 100 post landmark, here’s a list of our 5 most popular articles so far. Check out the good stuff you may have missed.

1. How to create your own iPhone app

2. The top 5 Twitter apps for Android

3. How to keep your business going when a volcano erupts


4. Top admen to follow on Twitter

5. Attack of the disgruntled employee

Jason Ross is a copywriter for The Duffy Agency. He loves working on both traditional and social media projects and speculating on the future of the ad industry.