Part 1: Know your
goals

There was a big
“hoopla” over at Seth Godin’s blog yesterday.

He posted an
entry about how
to build traffic on your blog. It
was filled with contradictions. Seth
seems to be a pretty smart guy, so I’m sure they were intentional!  

My interpretation
was that building traffic on your blog really depended upon your blogging
goals. What type of audience do you want? What do you want that traffic to do? Different things attract different people. 

The last item was
bolded (none of the others were). That
line read: “Write stuff that
people want to read and share”. No matter whom
your audience is, or what you want them to do, you should do this. 

Part 2: Know
yourself 

The interesting
part was that he turned the “comments” feature on for this post. Normally, you can write about a topic Seth
covers and link back to his site with a trackback, but you can’t
comment on his blog.

The audience went
wild! They loved comments and (you
can see by the very long list) that they used them liberally. Many people added points to his entry. But, alas, the next post went back to “no
comments allowed”. 

Seth explained in
his next
post that he feels compelled to address comments – especially those where
someone may have misinterpreted his meaning. He just doesn’t have the time to do that. He also finds that when he enables comments
he writes differently – in anticipation of the comments.

Part 3: The bottom
line 

You need to know your goals and you need to know
yourself. Structure your plans in a way
that takes both into account.

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