contentious.com

Here’s an interesting thing I’ve learned through long experience with online publishing (Web sites, blogs, e-mail publishing, more): Content that covers the basics tends to be extremely popular, over long periods of time.

“The basics” generally means explanations, introductions, and backgrounders of basic concepts, key issues, and terminology for any topic area. People love this stuff, especially online – where everyone is forever playing catch-up.

A good backgrounder never goes out of style. If you offer simple, clear, and relevant backgrounder or intro-style content, that content probably will attract a lot of incoming links, and also references from blogs and other venues – not just when you first publish it, but over time. This not only exposes your site to new audiences, it also can boost your search engine page ranking – important if your site relies on advertising revenue.

This kind of on-target, high-quality content can yield better results with more staying power than most of the search engine optimization strategies I’ve tried or seen.

Here’s an example of a good backgrounder in action…

Hands down, the most popular set of articles I’ve ever published on CONTENTIOUS is my primer What are Webfeeds (RSS) and Why Should You Care?. This comprises 12 blog entries. each of which is a mini-backgrounder on some basic aspect of webfeeds. Altogether, this series alone has accounted for 4.95% of total pageviews during the life of this weblog.

How significant is that? Very.

I just did quick analysis of pageview statistics for CONTENTIOUS since I relaunched this publication as a blog in Oct. 2003. During that time:

• 56% of all pageviews have been hits to my blog’s webfeed. (This doesn’t surprise me – the feed file typically gets the most hits on any site, by far, for sites that offer feeds.)

• 5.8% of pageviews have been this blog’s home page

Considered in that context, this series of backgrounders is definitely the biggest all-time draw to this weblog so far. In addition to my own Web stats, here’s some data about incoming links to this series:

• Google currently shows 168 incoming links from other Web sites to the home page of my webfeed backgrounder series. Google also shows 419 incoming links to the CONTENTIOUS home page – so that article series has achieved about 40% of the popularity of the blog as a whole.

• Technorati shows 80 links to my webfeed backgrounder series home page from 56 sources (mostly other blogs). For comparison, that’s about 42% of the number of links (189) that Technorati shows my blog’s home page (from 129 sources).
• Blogdex also has tracked som significant cross-blog conversation related to this series.

SERENDIPITY CAN BE HUGE

This past weekend, while I was away for a few days camping in the mountains, an interesting spike showed up in my weblog’s traffic stats. On last Friday, I had my highest-traffic day ever, by far – nearly 1,000 unique user sessions more than my previous high mark. Last night, after I got home and saw this, I looked to see where all that traffic came from. Did I get mentioned on Cnet News? CNN? No…

A soft-porn blog, Coolio’s Babes: Man’s Tribute to Woman, had linked to my webfeed backgrounder. The site’s creator had just added thumbnail images to his webfeed, and wanted to educate his audience more about webfeeds. Consequently, my blog’s traffic shot through the roof.

If only I had seen this coming (or if only I’d been anywhere near an Net connection that day), I would have added a note to my webfeed backgrounder home page highlighting another article I wrote which might be relevant to the Coolios Babes crowd: Sexy Webfeeds?. That kind of link may have brough me some new subscribers and bumped up my Google Adsense income a bit. Ah well, some opportunities always slip by…

CAPITALIZE ON HOW BLOGGERS AND REPORTERS LIKE TO LINK

The bottom line is, basic information is incredibly useful and popular, in just about every field.

On the Web, and especially in online news and weblogs, people like to provide links to backgrounders from basic terms used in their articles. Here’s an example from a July 26 Wired News article, The Empire Blogs Back:

“Six Apart, however, kept open its TrackBack feature, allowing anyone who read the original post on the company website to see excerpts and links to the scathing (and sometimes personal) criticism on other blogs.”

…In that excerpt, a Wikipedia entry serves basically as an online glossary for Wired News. However, a good backgrounder from a weblog could just have easily been the target of that link.

So when you’re wondering what to say online, don’t just look at the news – cover the basics. Write an explanation, or a tutorial. Answer a very common question. This encourages people to refer to your blog or site as a sort of online glossary – which ultimately can bring your site a lot of traffic for a long time.