Today I want to talk about creating quality. There are so many blogs in every possible niche, you may be focusing on how to get traffic to your blog. If that is your focus, you may want to read some of my other blog posts such as, Ten Ways to Promote Your Blog, and Weekly Wrap-Up: Link Building.

But today I want to focus on how to create a following on your blog and how to keep folks on your blog longer, reading what you have worked on so hard to express. Obviously there are many reasons why you want your visitors to visit often and to stay on your site longer. One factor that I have noticed over the past six weeks of testing, is that my Alexa ranking (which is a rough estimate of how popular your blog is) seems to be more directly impacted by how long folks stay on my blog than how many visitors I have. And how do you get visitors to stay on your blog longer? You give them quality; you answer the questions they have come looking for, you entertain. By doing this you create posts of interests, post that others will Digg or Twitter, creating more visitors, more repeat visitors and visitors that stick around longer to see what else you have written.

This week I would like to recommend several blog posts that speak to the importance of writing quality blog posts. The first is from, as you probably know by now, one of my favorite bloggers and internet marketers, Kim Roach. Her blog post, Case Study – 1 Article = 7,640 Visitors takes you step by step through the process she took to write a blog post that attracted visitors like crazy.

In her blog post Kim says,

The first thing I did was actually write the article. This is actually THE MOST IMPORTANT part of the process because the quality of your article is going to determine how far it will spread and how much traffic it will end up attracting. Promoting the article is definitely a critical piece of the puzzle but you MUST start by creating a truly exceptional article.

I love this paragraph because it makes two thing crystal clear! You must first WRITE, and second, what you write must be quality.

The second blog post that I found that speaks to this issue is Seth’s blog post, The Importance of Writing Good Content, where he talks about “Pillar Articles,” which are a set of articles that bring a constant flow of traffic to your blog. His take on quality blog posts are similar to Kim’s in which he says:

Well written content is linked to, twittered about and Digged by online users because it is useful, funny, insightful or maybe even odd. Good content increases the value of your blog and likelihood that visitors will return to see your next article.

My third recommendation from this week is Daniel Scocco’s post titled, Checklist for Writing a Quality Blog Post. As the name suggests, he outlines a list of what is necessary to make a blog post top quality. One of his check points specifically is the quality of the content. Says Daniel:

This is one of the most important questions you need to ask yourself. Will your content actually create value for the reader? Is it original and unique? …

People want to learn new things, solve problems, become more productive. They want to know how stuff works. Practical tips. Tutorials. Reviews. Can you help them with that?

It takes time to create quality, but I have found that it is much more important to blog less and write high quality then to blog more and create posts of lesser quality.

Have you done any testing about this yourself? Have you ever been surprised by posts that you wrote that were extremely well received or not well-received? I know that I have found that those posts that I feel most connected to seem to attract the most traffic.

Until next time,

~Norene