I was just drilling down Google Analytics for one of my blogs and I saw few articles receiving about 1000-1200 page views per month where as others are receiving about 50-100. That means 20% of these selected articles are bringing more than 60% of the traffic to the blog.
So what’s the difference between these articles and the rest of them?
After scrutinizing them I found some differences which would be useful to generate articles that can bring REAL traffic to your blogs:
1) Original Articles: I mean SERIOUSLY original. These articles were really original and nobody has blogged about it, ever!
2) Articles were helpful: Another important thing is all these articles were very helpful to the readers in some or the other way. It’s a tech blog, so people do get stuck in doing things and they really like it when someone gives a solution. So, bottom line is each and very article was providing a solution to a problem.
3) Short as well as long articles: This group has both short and long articles. There is one which was about 200 words. There are a lot of bloggers who say that writing more than 500 words is an ideal number. However, it doesn’t matter how lengthy is your content. So, even if you article is 200 words long there’s no need to rant unnecessarily. You can go ahead and hit the Publish button.
4) Step wise: Almost all the articles were written in a step by step manner. That means it was like Step-1: Do this then Step-2: Do that and so on. As discussed in my previous point that they were all about providing solutions to problems. Anyways, for a tech blog Step by Step procedure is the best way to provide a solution to a problem. But, I guess this could be generalized for any blog. People DO like step by step instructions. It is easier to follow and clear to understand. Also, you don’t have to go through the ranting.
5) To the point: All the articles provide to the point solutions for a problem. I mean no beating around the bush whatsoever. Well, techies don’t like ranting anyways. However, I am not sure about other niche.
To summarize the above points: To write an awesome article which can drive real traffic to your blog, you have to write helpful, step wise, to the point, original articles without worrying about the number of words.
You can try this in your own blog by drilling down Google Analytics for the content section and let me know, if your research matches mine.