The Key to Traffic? Be “Unique, Useful & Updated”

Marketing expert Seth Godin, who recently moved up a notch to #4 on the annual Forbes list of Internet celebrities, has published a new electronic pamphlet on how to acquire and retain web traffic, which he’s made available for free download from his blog. “There’s an enormous amount of superstition about what makes some pages rank high while others languish. When you look at the actual figures, though, much of that fades away,” he writes in the post introducing Money for Nothing (And Your Clicks for Free). The solution? “Create content that is updated, unique and useful. Again and again we see that sites that do all three manage to get more than their fair share of traffic.”

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while now, particularly in terms of author and publisher blogs. If you’re an author or a publisher, you have to ask yourself: What’s the problem I’m hoping to solve by creating this website? What can I tell visitors about the books I wrote/we publish that they aren’t going to discover at any other single website? What can I tell them about why I wrote/we publish those books? I know this sounds like basic stuff; to some extent, it is. Doesn’t make it any less worth paying attention to.

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