Most bloggers will agree that, a relatively low number of posts generate the vast majority of their blog’s traffic. How easy and simple it would be, if only you could see which posts will become these traffic generators before actually writing them (and especially before writing all the rest, that later prove to be useless).

I’m pretty sure that you have quite a lot of topics in your head that you are planning to write blogposts on. This easy-to-use checklist helps you determine whether they are worth the effort of writing them. This list, of course, cannot guarantee success, but it can provide you with solid guidelines for providing value for your readers that can result long term high, quality traffic (significantly different from the traffic you receive when you ask your friends to digg your article).

Is it useful?

It’s a real no-brainer by now, and you have heard it gazillion times: if you are running a professional blog, the value you give your reader is measured in usefulness. There are several ways to provide useful information, just to list a couple:

• Inform your readers about something they’ve never heard of
• Write a post that shows your readers how to do something
• Write a post that shows your readers how to do something they frequently do in a way they’ve never tried (and in a way that is supposedly better or easier than their old methods)
• Write a plan that they can act upon
• Share your experiences (positive or negative), and add a step-by-step guide that can be repeated

Of course there are a number of other ways to be useful, too. But you have to find a way to serve your reader with usefulness. If the topic you’re thinking of is not like that: don’t bother.

Is it striking?

The phenomenon that makes articles or blogposts go viral is the “Wow factor”. If your piece (or at least a part of it) makes your reader say: Shoot, I should have thought of that before he did, the reader will most definitely forward the article to his or her friends (or digg it, stumble it, youname it…).

While most “how-to-go-viral” guides will focus only on the post’s title (due to the harmful practice of Digg users of digging articles without actually reading them first), I think the Wow factor can be placed inside the article, too. But it has to be there, somewhere.

Is it a dupe?

I should have asked whether it is unique, but I haven’t.

This is because at times dupes can appear very unique for the first sight.

In fact, dupes can be different from word-by-word, copypasted articles. I don’t consider an article unique, if it’s:

• An article rewritten from another article
• An article recompiled from various sources
• An article without any new information in it

Unfortunately, most of the “27 ways to do thisorthat” type articles, you see out there are dupes. These lists can still be useful, but I think a blogpost or article is worth writing only if it has something in it, that hasn’t ever been written down by anyone before.

To cut a long story short, there are only three things that can make a blogpost unique:

• If the question it asks is new
• If the answer it gives to the question is new (regardless of whether the question is new in itself)
• If its approach is new

If someone is trying to sell you something, that none of the above, as new, he’s trying to make a fool of you.

An obvoius rule here is Googleing your subject in the research phase (ie: before you start writing it) and searching major social bookmarking sites, like Digg or Delicious for duplicates, exactly as Digg would do if you submitted an article. If the subject has already been covered, you have two options:

• Forget it
• Think of a very different approach

If you decide to go for the second option, make sure you include the link of the original article in your post, and reflect on it in a few words (saying how great that article is, although you disagree with it etc). This way your readers will know that you haven’t plagarized the original post, but you have additional (or different)thoughts on the subject.

Are you any good in it?

The most common mistake I see in the blogosphere is covering topics that the author knows nothing about. Some bloggers seem to think that reading three posts on a certain subject will make him or her professional enough to write a fourth one, while posing as an expert.

It is both lame and transparent.

If you are not an expert, you don’t have to pretend you are. If you have no clue on the subject you are planning to cover, I suggest you to drop it. But if you insist on covering it anyway, you still have a couple of options:

• Report on your personal experiences as you begin to have them
• Ask your readers’ opinions
• Try to implement some of the how-to-s out there in the subject, and report on what happens in reality

All of these options are better than pretending that you master a subject if you don’t.

Is it witty?

Would you give it thumbs up?

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Now I’m running over a couple of them. I plan to have this as a weekly regular (listing each week’s important lessons by the end of the week), so stay tuned, I’m sure that there’s more to come.

1. Bloggers are really-really nice people
When you start blogging, expect the first week to be busy. Extremely busy. You’ll have to play around with templates, establish your blog, watch out for all the technical details, and you’ll have to put a huge effort into planning the content as well. On the other hand, you’ll need to start networking with other people from your niche, let alone fellow-bloggers from outside your niche.

This first week was enough only to make a couple of first contacts with fellow bloggers, and I have to tell you that, I was simply amazed how nice they all turned out to be. It seems to me that people, who end up being serious in blogging, have an awful lot in common (which is, obviously both a part of the reason and a part of the result).
I’m pretty sure that we share the same values (or a lot of them) with Jenny Wallace, for example, as we are exploring the pros and cons of social media sites, and I hope to learn a lot from friendly and helpful pros, like Ben Barden, Easton Ellsworth or Yan Susanto. I guess, we really would enjoy a chat over a beer, it’s just that we happen to have an ocean between us with most of them. Still I expect to have lots of fun in this community.

2. Google Reader is not only inevitable but it’s getting better
I’ve been a Google Reader user for a while now, but I noticed only now that it became more user-friendly and even more useful than it used to be.

The new function I enjoy the most is that you don’t have to go to the “Manage Subscriptions” section in order to organize your feeds into folders, which in reality used to be a pain in the ass. I’m exploring new blogs and new feeds, subscribing to a lot of them nowadays (to much more than the 11 crucially important feeds I listed in one of my previous post), and it’s now really made easy to keep them organized in folders with this improved function.

3. Yahoo tracks incoming links far better than Google
Searching link:www.mysite.com is not a function that works particularly good in Google. Yahoo’s Site Explorer on the other hand, handles incoming links way better and in a more subtle way than Google does.
Tracking your incoming links or that of others’ is very important if you want to know a certain niche really well, but I’m not going into details right now. It’s just interesting that, for this task, I’ll prefer to use Yahoo from now on.

4. I really have to take the trouble and check out what the heck this StumbleUpon is
I’ve already mentioned that we share the interest with Jenny Wallace on exploring social bookmarking sites, and both of us bounced back from StumbleUpon, as it was way too complicated to digest, and I decided to postpone my StumbleUpon adventure for later, more relaxed times.
Then, after posting my list on the 11 must have feeds on Friday I was stunned to be flooded by StumbleUpon visitors. At the moment I have no idea how my site got there (I guess it was referred to or submitted by someone), how the visitors pick my site, or anything, but these are questions I will have to answer in the shortest time possible.

What about you? What are the most important things or ideas you learned this week? Feel free to leave a comment, and don’t forget to StumbleUpon my site if you happen to know what that means

cheers,
Zsolt