Here’s an easy way to write a blog post that will rank well in search engines and net you some quality traffic: solve a common problem. Find the answer to an issue that plagues many people interested in your niche. Supply a solution in a to-the-point post. Providing you picked a title that contains the sort of keywords frustrated searchers would be entering, it shouldn’t take too long for you to start ranking.
You may get lucky and have a major increase in traffic, or you could just make a smaller group of people very happy. (Which might lead to repeat visits…) If you do this a few times, the traffic will add up. Having ten posts that bring in 200 visitors every month is better than one post that brings in 1,000.
As an example, observe this recent post. As soon as Apple released iTunes 10, Twitter was abuzz with complaints about a minor design “improvement” that was made. Luckily, there were a couple of Terminal commands that would revert the change, for Mac users at least. I ended up writing a quick blog post with the solution and a small rant about how Apple was blatantly disregarding their own design guidelines. In a few hours I was on the Google result page for “itunes 10 vertical buttons,” and at the top of it within a day or two. I’ve done this plenty of times, and it has incrementally boosted my numbers.
