Tim Ferris and Ramit Sethi on Building Traffic and Other Blawging Tactics

Tim Ferris (author of The 4-Hour Work Week) and Ramit Sethi (author of I Will Teach You To Be Rich) just posted a few videos about blogging. Both have interesting blogs and a lot of readers. The contents of the videos are nothing earth shattering, but good reminders.

Side note: I have read both of the above books and love them. 4HWW really challenges the way you think about things and IWTYTBR is the most down to earth and practical financial advice I have come across to date.

Side, side note: I will be at RailsConf this week where Tim Ferris is keynoting. Really looking forward to it.

How to build traffic

Sometimes it is better not to post than to post something crappy. -Ramit

I completely agree with this. Like I’ve mentioned before, it is not how often you post, but how consistent you are at putting out good content.

Really good content that people are going to link to is ultimately what is most important. -Tim

Everytime I have sat down and really poured over a post, it has done well. It is almost as if readers can sense the effort you put into a post. Or maybe it is just hard to quickly throw together good content.

One other tip that Tim mentions is to be very conscious of what you title your posts (my thoughts on titles). He mentions that the most important thing is to think about how people will describe your post when they link to it. The more consistent people will be with the link text, the better you will do in google. Very good point.

More blogging tactics

This video is more general. Topics discussed are when to post (ie: time of day, day of week, etc.). The correct answer depends on what your goal is. If you are trying to get on Dig or create a flurry of traffic, timing is important. If, on the other hand, you are creating ever-green content where the goal is more to get long term search traffic, timing doesn’t really matter.

The most interesting thing that Tim mentioned in this video is that if a post doesn’t seem to gain traction, he redates it so that it disappears from the home page. He said that if a visitor is coming to his site for the first time, he wants to make sure that they see his best content. To me, the better solution would be to use the home page to feature your best content, instead of changing the publish date, but it is still an interesting idea.

Can I get a lot of traffic without previous success

This is the whole point of blawgtips. You do not have to be famous to see success in blawging. Nor do you have to have 10k readers. You can start up a niche blawg, on a topic you love and if you post consistently good content, the traffic and other rewards will come.