5 Characteristics of high traffic blogs you should copy

This one is from experience. Sometimes, when I come across that blog I never saw, I tend to dig up it’s metrics. You know when you are on a successful blog right? Within just a few seconds of your visit, you can identify if this is an MFA, a passion blog or a high value traffic one. And believe me digging into the metrics can really help and appearances can be deceptive too. I think one problem we all (I’m guessing) have is that we have these “Pre conceived ideas”.

So what are the factors common to high traffic blogs?

Please break out of the idea that I’m going to talk about quality blogs. No. I’m going to talk about blogs, good or bad, but are generating hell lot of traffic and of course revenue meanwhile.

Hell lot of content – food for spiders

Yea, more or less every high traffic blog I come across, which has good Alexa stats, can boast of at least a thousand good articles. Thousand is probably the least I’ve found. Forget SEO, forget usability, you provide whole lot of food for the spiders to chew on in text format and I’m sure there’s going to be massive long tail traffic. You may not rank number one consistently for a term but the amount of traffic you get from the many keyword combinations is awesome. Good enough to keep you at XXXX mark on AdSense revenues each month.

Simple Design with a focus on textual content

This is yet another fact. While most of us spend hundreds of thousands of dollars designing themes that are ranked high for usability and creativity, there are a bunch of websites that scores just average but does well with the traffic. I can’t even possibly say that they are doing good because they have a screwed up design, but there is a hidden truth that they focus heavily on the textual content. I believe so long as the textual content is searchable/indexable more than anything else with the standards in place, then that gives you that edge others miss.

Frequency of posting

I can bet on this one. Pick any favorite blog of yours, or any high traffic blog you know and find out their posting frequency. They sure will fall into the “at least one, if possible 5 per day” category. With a regular posting frequency, I think there’s a lot of credibility attached with. Regular readers can look up to you for at least a post daily and I think that’s a commendable effort. But the best blogs are the ones that has at least a few couple of articles published daily – no doubt on that.

The “awe” factor USP

So I stumble on this blog on Mac freeware applications and on my first visit I’m excited ! The sheer number of applications reviewed there delights me. “Why the hell didn’t I come across this blog earlier?” is what goes through my mind. I think this is a characteristic feature of a successful blog. So, even if these blogs don’t have a PR, or a Social Media campaign or even the author is not into any of the social medias, still we tend to link to them, talk about them and subscribe to them. It’s all because of that one awe factor that could be one’s USP.

The value. Let me call it “Information as Service”

I would love to subscribe to any blog that will give me free valuable information. You see, information is everywhere, but only the ones who gives you that extra bit of “un told tip” would be the one you remember. And I don’t think anyone will disagree. This is more or less like the open source project , where the mass tend to stick to ONLY valuable and free information. All the high traffic blogs stick to this agenda of delivering free information in their domains, constantly with the same quality time and again – and that’s something one can resist.

Essentially, if you’ve been wondering why your AdSense revenue is not improving try the above points, just ape them and see if makes any positive impact on your blog. I’m sure it will.