Tips on how to grow traffic with the right content

Part of what I do during all my sleepless nights (hey, I’m young) is try to think logically about how people browse about the internet (hey, I’m a geek).

To this end, I spend a lot of time thinking about what my browsing habits are, what I see other people doing online, and staring at boring-ass statistics like pages most frequently visited and yaddda yadda. Incidentally, the most popular thing I’ve ever written is a guide to making the classic video game TIE Fighter work on modern Windows XP machines.

When you break it down, people are usually online for only a couple of reasons. If you toss out shopping (because that doesn’t apply to me), then people mostly look at sites for three different types of content, and my guess is that it’s in this order:

• Reference (how do I…)

• News (what happened today in rhode island…)

• Editorial (what does Friedman think about what happened today in rhode island…)

So if you’re looking to grab traffic, you should probably focus heavily on those three types of content - in that order.

This post is basically a cheap trick to fit into the first category (how do I get more site traffic). What’s annoying about posts like this is that while they do offer good advice, the irony is often too much for me to bear.

Regardless, this is a strategy I’m going to start working on at Flicker, and we’ll see how well it does. Today we have two new editorial pieces up - I wrote about debunking the PS3 - iPod comparison, and our excellent blogger Corvus shared his thoughts on in-game advertising.

Now we need to work on having more how-to content.