Positioning yourself in the minds of your readers as an expert on the subject, or offering a different point of view, gives them incentive to keep coming back to and be loyal to your blog.

So, on my business blog I tried an experiment to use a similar phrase in a title to see if I could generate more traffic. I haven’t….

SEO is weird (which is why I wrote the biz post).

So, I’ve noticed something interesting about a lot of the top ranked sites. They’re all news sites that blog about the latest hot thing. American Idol, political elections, war in the middle east, etc.

How do these sites compare to niche sites? From what I’ve seen, these big news sites tend to do a lot better in terms of traffic. More traffic = more money, if I’m not mistaken.

So why is there so much emphasis on making niche sites? It seems to me, that if someone wanted to create a site that was virtually guaranteed to get mad visitors, they should just go check google trends and write posts about whatever the most searched topics are.

The one problem I could see with this is that there’s probably a million other people doing the exact same thing. They’ve probably got 5 bloggers that just sit there all day and write stories about the next hot thing. I don’t know about you guys, but rewriting articles about Kanye west etc all day would bore the crap out of me. As it is I can’t bring myself to regularly update any site other than the main one, which is basically my blog about being a new internet marketing. Problem is, it doesn’t make any money, but for now I just want to get traffic and THEN I’ll worry about ad placement.

Anyway, I’m kind of rambling now, but here’s my main question:

How realistic is it for bloggers to create sites like this and get anything from it. Also, how would one go about marketing sites like this? Frankly, I don’t see my site making page 1 of Digg or Reddit unless I discover the cure for cancer. Seems like these news sites would be better suited for this.

/rant

Last month I have written an article on Samsung Mobile which got me some 75,000 pages view in 30 days.

Per question/ comment
@Jason Drohn: nothing serious SEO wise, and certainly the post itself wasn’t focused on SEO. We did however detect through Twitter trends and other places that people were asking about Adam Lambert being gay, so in that regard there probably was some SEO at play. Nothing though to a serious level that others my advocate.

@Surender Sharma: pleasure is all mine. It’s a mix: you can’t run a blog on long term alone, end of story. But if you can mix some marque content with short term news/ topical stuff, it in theory mixes well so you’ve got traffic coming in on both fronts.

@Joshua Elliot look, agreed, we do a broad topic area, but we’re really a serious exception compared to most blogs, indeed Darren will tell you, and I will tell you that you should specialize…because that’s how it’s done. When we started the site (there was 4 on the team including myself as editor and publisher when we launched, there’s now 8), I wanted to do something a bit crazy, something I thought I’d enjoy doing as opposed to what might naturally work the best following the rule book. It could have failed, indeed at times I actually thought it would, but we managed to build something that’s currently siting in Technorati between 70 and 80. Not quite at Problogger levels, but Darren has a serious head start :-)

On the “top searches” part though; you may have missed my point. Sure, we managed to hit a topical search, but the same ideas apply to all long term content, and you need look no further than some of the stuff here at Problogger, or sites such as Smashing Apps. I know every time I do WordPress research for example how many times I hit 1-2 year old posts on other sites. You can make posts wag if they hit a niche well, and people collectively search for it over time.

@Dena thx

@Dan see above. But to extend on that: the key is to hit a target niche, no matter what the size. It might be people looking for a WordPress solution for example, or it might be about Adam Lambert. Most things have an audience, be it small or big. If you provide a post that hits the search query better than the next guy, you stand a great chance of breaking out. I can say a lot more, but this comment is already way too long. I’m about to travel for 5 days, but send me an email if you want to discuss further, happy to.

@Jonathan Frei depends. We’ve had a lot of success on occasion (that’s contradictory I know, but let me explain) on constantly updating posts. I live blogged a riot in LA maybe 4-5 mths back. It didn’t start as a live blog, but I had a raw feed from a news helicopter, and word had gotten out about a riot…but the main outlets weren’t offering much coverage. I just kept going and going for hours, and it was a great post, maybe 100kish, but nice hunting for a 4-5 hour period on a story which was only ever going to have a very short span.

The key though is time. If it’s a breaking story update the original post. If it’s a story with a longer time frame (say days or weeks) write new posts and link back to the original in context.

If anyone wants to email me with questions specifically, happy to respond, although you’ll have to bare with me on a response time, because it can be up to a week, but happy to help where I can.

If you can’t find my email address though, you’re not trying hard enough ;-)

best
duncan.

My tops post are

http://dailycashsaver.blogspot.com/2009/09/what-would-you-do-with-100.html

http://dailycashsaver.blogspot.com/2009/09/economic-recovery-think-again.html

My Greatest post everhttp://dailycashsaver.blogspot.com/2009/08/way-to-finacial-independence.html

Where did the traffic mainly come from?

This one is really trick Why? Because i started blogging about 3 months ago and when i first started I was using twitter and i was getting little traffic. 5 visitors lol. Today i say 50-60% come from Social Networks. 15% come from articles. The rest come from google and other. But now I’m listed under the keyword Daily Cash Saver a that has 1million results so I’m happy. Hopefully i get listed under CashSaver Cash Saver and Daily Saver soon those keywords I’m hoping to target. I get 50-60 Visitors a day and couple AdSense clicks so I’m happy.

Did you do anything extra to market or promote this post or did it just happen organically?

Well Originally I started out on twitter i got to 2700 visitors then i got banned. after that i tried forum marketing then i tried some social marketing. Today i am focusing on 2 things. Every day i get up and say happy birthday to everybody at sitepoint then say visit my blog. Then i go on facebook and talk to my friend tell them to check out my new blog post. Write 10 Articles and 10 Comments on blogs.
One my goals in the future is to buy some peoples forum signatures and start getting backlinks and more traffic.

What can we as bloggers learn from the success of this post?

Be in it for the long haul 3 months in I’m getting ok traffic but don’t think your going to be the next problogger anytime soon. I personally believe it takes 1 year to fully understand and get blogging and social networking and SEO. By that time you will have opened doors that will change your life.

Also Read alot of books on SEO every day i learn alot.
A great Quote i remember a while back.

“God gave you 2 ears and 1 mouth that means you should listen twice as much as you talk”

Tell what you know and nothing more when you try to act like the number one SEO expert people will call you out. Add good content and say things people are not blogging about.

Then you will be bring in good traffic and making good stream of income. Just keep working at it.

http://dailycashsaver.blogspot.com/

Nice case study!

What is the post on your blog that has had the most traffic in the last 12 months?
MB’s TOP 30 Female (drama) Monologues (156, 845 pageviews in 2009…247, 988 pageviews since 2008)

Where did the traffic mainly come from?
Traffic has mainly come from Google, I would say in the ballpark of about %80. The rest of my traffic has come from the visitors who faithfully come to the site for new monologue material.

Did you do anything extra to market or promote this post or did it just happen organically?
I would say that this post happened organically. Based on the search taking place within Monologue Blogger’s site, I noticed there was an abundance of attention given to my female monologue content. At that point of realization, I had hundreds of monologues previously written on the site and decided it may serve my female and male visitors well by compiling a list of MOST POPULAR monologue posts within the site.

This would essentially provide two things:
1-It would give me the opportunity to provide for my readers what they felt was useful monologue content.
2-It would give my new visitors an easier time of finding popular monologues right away without sifting through the thousands currently available.
I guess you can say I gave my most viral monologues as lists within my most viral posts. This knowledge all stemming from the publics perspective.

What can we as bloggers learn from the success of this post?
I believe that the true nature of your blog will tell you things. Meaning, if you pay attention to your audience and what their needs are, you can help them more by providing additional posts in regards to those needs. Every blog is its own entity, which functions its own way and has its own unique visitors coming to the site. What may work for me may not necessarily work for someone else. In general, it’s important to continually explore and evolve and try things out.

My advice is to understand your audience. The best way to do that is by communicating with them through social media and building relationships with your visitors. It also doesn’t hurt to ask for feedback every now and then because you will always find value in that.

Excellent article, inspiring!

http://dailycashsaver.blogspot.com/

I belive I was lucky on that one, and since that time i am seeking more of this kind of post by!

I just want to mention that I posted this post at the end of March 2009, and it has 14,271 views now!