This is in response to a direct message I got on Twitter by someone who requested not to be named.

(If you have a question for me that you’d like me to answer in the blog, you can send them to me on our contact page. If you’re reading via feed, it’s a good time to stop by the site and see the last round of changes we’ve made to help you. Just sayin!)

The question was:

 I keep getting ideas of what to write from my peers, how do I avoid looking like the “me too” person? 

 

That’s actually a common problem for bloggers, especially in the tech area. Blogging veterans call the tendency for a lot of people to report on the same thing “the echo chamber”. None of us wants to be the blog that just reports on the other blogs — our readers will say, “but TechCrunch already told me that, Tinu, so why should I subscribe to both of you?”

The answer to this issue is two-fold.

First of all, strive to be as unique as possible. You don’t want to bill yourself as the cutting edge expert, then cover the same content other industry leaders wrote about the day before, the month before, the year before. Remember that people who read Newsweek, sometimes also read the New York Times. They don’t cover the same topics the same way, in part to remain useful to that over-lapping audience. 

In journalism, this is why reporters look for “exclusives”. In some cases, you aren’t going to be the only person reporting a story though.If If Google comes out with a new feature that is helpful to your readers, you don’t want to just tell them to go read the Google blog – so offer them some piece of information other blogs aren’t.

How is this relevant to their business? 

What are some steps to implementation?

What’s your opinion after a “first-look” at the tool?

Unique content, regardless of the format you deliver it in, is a key element for retaining visitors. 

Secondly, you’re going to find that there are times when not telling others about something you discovered is unavoidable, because it’s better to sound like a me-too person than to neglect to inform the part of your audience who pretty much only listen to you online. You have people like that in your audience, who are only subscribed to your newsletter, would only buy products on a topic if you made one, who just don’t read any other ezines in your industry, because they happened upon you or simply because you’re the only one who makes sense to them.

Most iPod users would rather be shot than have to switch to a Zune. And vice versa, by the way.

The question is, how do you serve those people with the information you find without alienating your advanced people who may have heard the news you want to report ten times before they get to your blog?

It’s so easy. And you can get TONS of traffic out of doing this. 

Link to the other sources. Do a shorter audio, video, slideshow, bullet list, and link to all the other references. Send trackback notificaitons to all the other blogs. Write to the authors to let them know you wrote about them. 

Add/vote on the other sites in social media bookmarking sites, and share your article about them in social networking sites. 

So how does this bring you traffic?

You have no idea of the gratitude that results when you fully credit other people with an idea, a breaking news story or simply, a good blog post. It’s done so seldom online that it’s now the norm for someone to see a fresh perspective on someone’s blog, create a product from it, and have it on the market before you can say “stop, thief!”

When, instead of opening oneself up to an ugly lawsuit over copyright infringement, or the ridicule of your customers who see that all you do is reblog other people’s content, you can do an end run around all these problems with one simple, elegant sentence. 

“I’m writing about that same thing – where would you like me to like to you?”

And when you link to people? They tend to link back.

You’ve heard that before… but what you don’t understand is that linking is the key to ALL the traffic on the web. 

Better search results come from proper contextual linking.

Links are the roads on which internet traffic travels. 

Linking out can help you become seen by humans and search robots alike as an authority site – it says “I’m so confident in the quality of my content that I will show you where you can get tips elsewhere.”

Give credit where credit is due. 

Send links to the people who have the same great ideas. 

Before you know it, you’ll have built a highway of traffic pointing to your site as the premier destination.

Coming soon – How Traffic Works, a preview to understanding the Whys of Traffic.

I just found out that I’m being reccomended from a blog I have been sporadically frequenting. The blog has been alive several months longer than mine. In it, Olga shares marketing ideas - her honest opinion on things she has read and some new ideas she came up with when reading them. You can also start from the top of her site about starting a successful online business.

Thanks for the link back Olga!

You can get an email when someone links to your site. VERY handy. I’m going to test this code out on my site… a little afraid of the amount of email I will get when I publish an article, but it seems worth it to know that kind of information.

A reader writes: “So, are you saying that submitting articles will increase the search egnine rankings of my site?”

The short answer, no. If that’s what you’re getting from my tips, please read more carefully. I’ve never said that.

Having your articles published across the Net can do a lot of things for your site – among them, get your link on other sites that are spidered more often than yours, thus leading the spider back to your site.

This is not always considered the same thing as a link back by search engines.

Although, some sites that I’ve been published on *have* given me an outright link-back on their links page or in their resources section. Fabulous when it happens – the purpose of submitting articles?

No.

Can you improve your rankings for terms you want with articles? Yes, of course. There are several ways in which it can help you.

The central key is anchor text – I’m not going to spell it out for you, but you can read more about that in my higher rankings tip. Another key is using not the top keywords that you want, but minor keywords in your article, that lead back to a part of your site where you have *organically* used the keyword you really want.

I talk about that a lot more in the next update to my book on Google.

So, once again, so we’re clear – your article’s primary purpose is to spread the word about you and your site, which is only achieved by giving quality information. Secondly, your article can get your site Spidered, not necessarily listed, not if it isn’t done correctly.

Does the method in my book work? Go to my forums and ask the people who’ve tried it. Or look at the Google stats for my own site.

I have only 35 sites linking to me, and haven’t done any SEO for my site in six months. My site is only mentioned on 1200 other sites today, and typically after I get a good article published, that number jumps anywhere in the range of 4500 – 10,000 sites. Yet, I get enough visits from search engine traffic, other sites or individuals sites picking up my feed and through referrals and link backs to sustain a full-time income working from home. Google spiders me daily. My site was never dropped during the Florida update. My PR went from zero to five in less than six weeks and has never dropped.

How do I do that, and not have to constantly worry about whether my site is getting enough traffic?

That’s what my columns and books are about – showing you how you can do the same thing, on a limited time or money budget.

In fact, I’ve decided to show you that I can duplicate the same results with this new site, FreeTrafficTip.com – see the Google stats for that page as they stand now. I’m already getting spidered on a daily basis. The new site will be one of my on-going case studies.

I’ll be back to tell you about the changes that are going to happen on this site shortly.