What I Learned About Getting Traffic From Seth Godin

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I am a huge fan of Seth Godin’s work; his ideas are brilliant and are the future of marketing.

I own most of his books and earlier this year when I came home from Barnes & Noble with his latest book, Linchpin, my wife turned to me and said, “If you love his stuff so much why don’t you marry him?”

She of course was only teasing (I hope!) but it got me thinking.  With all the marketers and would-be-gurus out there spouting their advice, what is it about Seth’s message that resonates with me so well?

I thought about this quite a bit and the answer I came to is this:  I get more traffic, sell more product, and make more people happy when I follow his advice.

Sounds cheesy, huh?  But it’s true.

Here are some of the things I learned from Seth about getting traffic and building a popular blog.

You don’t need super long blog posts

Last April I read Atlas Shrugged which is 1,200 pages long and weighs in at 2.4 pounds (for the paperback version!).  It took me 5 weeks to read it.

People visiting your site aren’t willing to spend 5 weeks to read what you have to say.  In fact you’ll be lucky if they spend 5  minutes.

Looking at Seth’s blog posts you’ll see that they are on average fairly short – maybe a couple hundred words.  But every post makes a point.

So make sure everything you write has a point and gets to it before the reader get bored and wanders off to YouTube to be entertained by a Ninja Cat.

Headlines matter

If you’re like me you probably don’t visit your favorite blogs one at a time every day to see what’s new.  Instead most of us use RSS aggregators and Twitter to keep up to date.  This saves us a lot of time and allows us to effortlessly scan 30 headlines in no time at all.  And we only click on the ones that catch our eye.

So if you want people to do more than scan over your headline (and never click on it) then put a little effort into crafting headlines that grab the reader’s attention.

If you have trouble crafting smart headlines then read:
Blogging by Numbers: How to Create Headlines That Get Retweeted

Theory is nice but experience is what really counts

Reading about how to ride a bike is pointless when you could learn way more in a few minutes by getting on a bike and “learn by doing”.  This idea applies to every aspect of life including marketing and SEO.  In fact Seth recently wrote If you want to learn to do marketing…then do marketing.

If you are reading this but haven’t taken the time to try out anything you’ve learned read then stop reading and “learn by doing”.

Seriously, stop reading, turn off your twitter stream, sever your umbilical connection to Facebook, close your email, don’t take another survey or quiz (i.e. How many Justin Biebers could you take in a fight?), and don’t buy another get-rich-quick ebook until you’ve applied something you’ve learned read about it.

You haven’t actually learned anything until you have done it.

Consistency matters

There are about 10 blogs I read on a regular basis and 9 out of 10 of them posts something new every day.  (The 1 blogger that doesn’t post something new everyday is Tim Ferriss.)

As Darren Rowse once said, every blog post is doorway to new visitors and a chance to connect with people.

You don’t need your own domain

For some of you this will come as shock.  Having your own domain is nice but is not required.

Seth runs his popular blog on Typepad which is a free blogging platform:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/

Anyone with $10 and a pulse can get their own domain and throw up some content on it.

But very few will take the time and effort to create value for readers and interact with them.

Tagged as: traffic