Content is King in the blogosphere.

It drives current readers back to your site, and entices new readers to visit – and maybe stay awhile via RSS.

Writing regularly is key to keeping your readers – but a strong article archive can keep – and sustain – traffic during those times when you can’t stand to blog or simply are too busy for the task.

Pillar articles are an excellent way to generate blog hits. These articles are timeless. They offer key advice that readers will come back to view. Readers can share it at any time – tomorrow or ten years from now. New readers can learn something that will never be outdated. They can be blog posts or pages of content easily accessible on your site.

Every blog can have these types of articles – even hobby blogs, or life blogs or writers on the move. You just have to sit down and make a list of topics that current and new readers can enjoy at any time.

I haven’t written a lot at Market My Novel since I created The Demented Muse (and met my new beau and started looking for a full-time job). However, pillar articles on this site – including the Etiquette Week post, How to Respond to Bad Reviews – continued to drive traffic to Market My Novel.

When you have time, sit down and write out topics for pillar articles. Write them up at once, then post them throughout the next several months. Track your hits via Google Analytics (WordPress users should install one of the FAB WordPress plugins for easy dashboard access). See which articles are most popular and generate ideas for new articles from them.

Do you use pillar articles to drive traffic? Talk about your experiences below.

Learn more about pillar articles from these authors:

How to Write Great Blog Content – The Pillar Article

Reader Challenge Roundup: Pillar Articles

Here are articles by other writers on how to drive traffic to your blog:

21 Ways to Get More Subscribers to Your Blog

15 Tips to Increase Blog Traffic

How I Grew My Blog! 

Google and Facebook have inked a deal to include the popular social network’s posts in its searches.




That means your rankings in Google could get a lot better – especially if you are plugged in to Facebook.

Got a Fan Page? Integrate your blog feed into the wall posts. Get on the Networked Blogs application.
Integrate Twitter with Facebook. That way, every Tweet goes to Facebook – and then goes to Google.
Post! Every picture, post, note, response to comments and your scores for Word Challenge and Movie quizzes will be cataloged in Google.

As great as this is, it also means you need to watch your privacy settings. Be sure to allocate your friends into categories and set your privacy settings according to what you want them to see.




If you have a day job, you might want to avoid publishing your scores to games like Word Challenge – especially during work hours.