Reacting to Events Before They Happen

"Seasonal Traffic and How to Capture It for Your Blog"
ProBlogger (July 4, 2007)

"Don’t Miss Seasonal Opportunities on Your Blog for Spectacular Traffic. Read to the bottom of this post for an example of how I’ve used the same content three times in 18 months to generate 50,000 page views on one post.

"One of the skills that I encourage bloggers to develop is to think ahead about what events might be coming up that will impact the niche that you’re writing about.

"The web is a fairly rhythmic place and every year there are waves of activity across search engines and other websites that are quite predictable...."

In common with most reasonably valid advice, this is mostly common sense.

It's interesting, though, to see the 41 comments that accumulated during the year that this post has been up.

The post has examples, charts, and links to related posts.

All in all, a pretty good resource.

If Content is King, Voice is the Ambassador

You've heard that "content is king." It's a cliché by now, but true: on a website, or a blog, if there isn't content, it's not likely that there will be visitors. The "content" is facts. Information of some sort - text, visuals, or sound - that informs or entertains.

There's something else that's important, too.

I recently read that "any blogger can beat Wikipedia" by improving writing style, being opinionated, and staying up-to-date.

Today, I'm going to argue that the first point, writing style, is very important.

"Style," in this sense, goes beyond correct spelling and coherent syntax. It's a matter of putting 'personality' in your writing.

Dashiell Hammett and Charles Dickens are both accomplished writers. Although some academic purists might dispute my assertion, I'm basing my statement on the fact that they both sold quite a few commercially successful books.

However, their writing style was very different. Dashiell Hammett's style was "raw, unadorned, 'hard-boiled.' Charles Dickens style was the sort of 19th century semi-poetic saunter that led someone to quip that he must have been paid by the word.

"Voice" is the way writing 'sounds' when it's read. Voice is one of the reasons people kept buying books by Dickens and Hammett.

And an individual, appealing voice is a reason that people come back to one website or blog, and not to another, when both have similar content.

Voice can be entertaining by itself. More importantly, it creates a tone and and helps interpret content for the reader.

So, content may be king, but voice is the ambassador.

Content Isn't King?

"The 4 Ways of Building Traffic to a Blog and Why Most Bloggers Pick the Wrong Method" is much less incoherent than many 'advice' posts. And, there are some good ideas there.

The basic point is that content is important, but so is making your blog search-engine-friendly, talking up your blog and encouraging others to do so, cooperating with other bloggers to boost each other's traffic, and sometimes pay for advertising.