Bloggers Boot Camp, 2nd Edition

8Building Traffic, Making Money, and Measuring Success

There are plenty of people who will sell you snake oil they claim can gain more traffic. You don’t have to go far on Google to find plenty of balderdash about keywords, secret algorithms, and traffic-boosting tricks. In our own history as bloggers we have rarely had much truck with those sorts. In fact, there have been times when we’ve ignored search engine optimization (SEO) completely, writing stuff that we know will appeal to humans and not robots. That’s our trick.

Here’s our piece of advice: write good stuff, tell people about it, keep writing good stuff. As one of our favorite authors Farhad Manjoo once wrote, “Optimizing for Google results is a little like going out and buying the ...