Drive Traffic with Destination Content

This is a modified excerpt of the book I’m slowly writing on marketing your blog and getting noticed in the blogosphere. Any comments are more than welcome.

I have a term to introduce: Destination Content.

Destination content is the holy grail of blog fodder. It is what every great blog is full of, and what every blogger aspires to produce. It is the type of content that brings people onto the web in the first place, and if you make it, they will come.

That’s rule number one of blogging: if you have destination content, you will get readers. Oh sure, it helps if you advertise and cross-comment and do all the stuff we talk about at the Blog Business Summit, but I’ll tell you right now that fundamentally, it’s the content that matters.

So, what exactly is destination content?

Destination content is, in this order:

1. Reference material (how-to’s and reviews)

2. Lists (top 10s and memes)

3. Opinion (why nobody will win the Triple Crown again?)

If you look at the searches logged every day by Google (which you can’t really do unless you go to Google offices), you notice that after the faddish “Britney Spears” type search terms, almost 70% of all searches are questions for which there are actual answers.

In other words, 70% of what people look for on the web is reference material. Why go to a library or browse a magazine when a simple keyword search is likely to turn up the same information? better information?

Last May, I wrote an article for Flicker Gaming that was a nice, visual guide to making TIE Fighter run on Windows XP. I wrote the article because I’ve always considered TIE Fighter to be the best game ever made, and I was excited when I found out how to make it run on modern computers. But that is the single most popular post I have ever written, anywhere. It had over 70 comments when I moved it over to this site, and it still tops the pageviews even though I wrote it months ago.

Why? Because it hits high in Google every time someone wants to know how to run TIE Fighter.

Whatever niche you’ve aimed your blog at, there are questions to be answered. If you can’t come up with the questions yourself, try looking through the FAQs on popular sites that cover your topic - and then do a better job answering their questions. Any time you think to yourself “how do I do this again?”, make it a post. This is the first and most powerful kind of destination content.

It is the most powerful kind of destination content because if it is written well, it will never lose it’s value. This is how blogs leverage The Long Tail in traffic, by creating a back-catalog of valuable content that, at no cost to the blogger, is available through search to anyone on the internet at any time.

In this way, a good reference article, whether or not it is a popular topic, will probably be found at least three or four times per month by someone who will really appreciate the answer. Enough back articles, and you have a lot of aggregate traffic, plus a good chance of gaining new readers as they find your posts helpful.