The short answer: I don’t know. But here’s what I have learned: The more articles you write, the higher the likelihood that one of them will be a hit.

Did I know which articles would be hits before when I wrote them? Nope. What’s the secret: Keep writing!

I’ve read lots of articles from other bloggers about what goes into writing a great blog article. They say write compelling, interesting, useful content. They say try to help people solve problems. They say use a snappy, eye-catching title. I always try to do these things, yet I have no way of predicting which articles will do well, and which will remain unread, and eventually get covered with cyberdust.

But one thing that the bloggers say, is to keep writing. And I’ve followed this advice. While I always try to write articles that are relevant to small business website owners, my topics vary from things that annoy me to video tutorials to all kinds of web-related advice. But I always try to write about things that small business website owner might find helpful and interesting.

A good example of a blog article whose popularity and subsequent traffic took me completely by surprise, is my Kavam article. You’ve never heard of Kavam? Neither had I, until one day, after watching my website traffic stats, I noticed that I was getting a lot of traffic from this one domain called “Kavam.net”. Over and over, it appeared as if someone from this domain was coming to one page of my site and leaving. Day and night, they came and left.

Since this pattern looked odd, I did some investigating. I discovered it wasn’t a human, but rather a badly behaving search robot called Charlotte that had been hitting my site. I decided to write a short blog article about what I had discovered.

To my surprise, the traffic started pouring in, other people started linking to my article – I was stunned. Apparently many other people were searching for the same solution, how to stop this web bot from crawling their websites. I just happened to be one of the first to post a blog article about it. Since my blog is optimized for search engines, new blog articles get crawled very quickly, usually in under an hour. So my article was available in the Google index quickly and therefore coming up in search results for “Kavam” or other related keywords that I had included in my article.

So the moral of the story is, to keep writing, about all kinds of things related to your blog’s topic, because you never know which one is going to end up being a big hit.

If you found this article helpful, please take a moment to share it with your friends, it will be much appreciated. Thanks! Jill