The Geek Brewery

Recently, I’ve noticed the trend that more and more bloggers (including me) post sizzling-hot current events to increase their blog traffic. These events include heinous incidents (the RCBC Cabuyao Bank Robbery), board and college admission examination results release, controversial controversies, among others. We optimize our pages a lot to top the search engine results page. We tend to overlook the fact that this traffic is short-term, as short as a day – on lucky instances may even extend to only up to a week.

The tips I’m about to give you is how to convert your short-term traffic increase to long-term. These tips doesn’t guarantee success as I myself haven’t tested them yet. I’m still planning to shift to this traffic-increase model scheme this coming months.

• Make your pillar articles (your best content) as accessible as possible. Even if their reading a board exam result post, make sure that links to your pillars are visible. Once they get a chance to read your impressive and good posts, the more chances that they’ll return to your blog and subscribe to your feeds.
• Reduce the number of advertisements on your page, or make them less-likely to look like one. In the short-run, this might hurt your earnings a bit — but surely the short-run trade-off would bear even bigger fruits. Personally, I’m less likely to return to a blog which slaps advertisements on my face.
• RSS feed buttons and email subscription fields should be strategically placed. Usually, a reader expects an RSS feed button on the “above the fold” (top) part of the page. Also, putting an email subscription field at the end of an article is also effective especially for the techy ones who doesn’t understand RSS.
• Reply to comments. I rarely do this, but I’m planning to make this a habit. A visitor is more likely to come back to your site if they see that you reply to comments. Should they have questions, they’ll surely watch out if you’ve got them a reply.

That’s it. Just four short tips. Should you have more, just put place them on the comments and I’ll add them with a link back to you (instant link).

So the next time you’re posting a sizzling-hot current event, don’t forget to follow my tips. I bet their effective as they sound. Good luck.