Blogging is for the Birds

The ways of blogging may often seem strange and mysterious, especially to new bloggers seeking traffic, popularity and fame. Oh sure, there are plenty of websites that give advice on how to increase your traffic, how to get links and page rank, but in my experience I have found that it's the oddest and quirkiest things that will generate the traffic that you never expected.

I have another blog, Nedfulthings, that I created a few years ago and filled mostly with creative writing, along with the occasional story of the type I write here. My regular visitors consisted mostly of other writers and poets - they did, that is, until one fateful post.

On November 5, 2005, I wrote a post called Bird Omens. It was a little story about a true occurrence, a bird that had flown into a mirrored window. The incident gave me cause to reflect on the meanings we give everyday events and what they may show us about how we are navigating the course of our lives. Naturally, I gave a brief dissertation on what my mother had told me about bird omens (my mother had something to say about everything).

I only recently returned to that blog after an absence of about a year. Much to my surprise, traffic is still pretty high on that blog, especially considering the fact that it lay dormant for so long. But what surprised me most of all was that most of the hits, every day without fail, are on my nearly two-year-old post about that dazed bird. The number of Google searches for "bird omens" and "birds flying into windows" is amazing.

So my advice to anyone looking to build traffic is simple. Write on any topic you like... just make sure that somewhere in the course of your article, a bird smacks itself into a window.

Read Bird Omens