54 ideas for increasing your blog traffic

Seth Godin has a good little post over on his blog entitled How to get traffic for your blog. The fact that I’m linking to his post indicates to me that his method is working. Actually he’s got some useful ideas, some obvious ideas, some self-referential ideas, and of course some contradictory ideas. The basic message I think is write stuff that people want to read—even if that means writing about a very narrow topic. Here at Manufactured Environments we’ve taken an the-world-is-our-oyster approach and comment on a lot of technology, social, cultural, and personal stuff. We’re eclectic, and we’re definitely one of the best blogs out there. I’ve been doing this online writing thing for six and a half years, and it keeps on getting better in my opinion. Back in the early days of 2000 and forth, there weren’t a lot of us doing online writing. At that time, my writing style was more about the personal, and I rarely linked. As time has gone on, I’ve linked more and more. And frankly, there’s a lot more stuff to link to these days. There are a few mega-aggregators like Metafilter and Boing Boing that link to tons of online material, but there are definitely other very good places to find quality links. I personally think that to write a good blog, it helps to read blogs. See what other people are doing, link to them, and foster community.

Also of interest, this classic Manufactured Environments post called Ten Things I’ve Learned About Blogging.