As usual, Seth is simple and short, whereas my own 3-part Squidoo tips tutorial on how to build web traffic is in-depth and too long.

One of Seth’s points jumped out at me:

You have no right to traffic. If you’re lucky, and GOOD, you earn some.

You’ll earn it when you do something daring, interesting, useful, provocative, free, compelling, emotional or urgent.

Hurry.

I’ve said this in other ways, but never quite so bluntly: YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO [WEB] TRAFFIC.

There are millions of fascinating, useful, incredible, wonderful, exactly-what-people-want web pages out there. A web user will never see more than a tiny fraction of them. So why should anyone pick your page, out of all those pages, to visit? Why stay there? Why read it?

It’s up to you to make it worth their time.

I just noticed on my “Is Squidoo a Scam?” lens that someone said he’d made four lenses and hadn’t earned any money in six months, and he was giving up.

On the one hand, it IS hard to get web traffic.

On the other hand, he hadn’t filled in his profile, he only had ONE lens left in his profile, and it was on a very popular topic for which there are over 970,000 webpages, according to Google.

Newbies write on popular topics, thinking they’ll get lots of traffic. They don’t realize that popular topics have thousands if not millions of pages already written on them, and they’re competiting with all those pages.

Okay, I’m preaching to the choir. The point is, you can’t assume a page will get traffic. It really is work to make useful, unique, readable, entertaining, grab-the-visitor-by-the-throat-and-make-them-stay webpages.

What can you do to boost the odds?

• Write on what you LOVE and KNOW. Passion, humor, and real in-depth knowledge shines through.
• Write on things that aren’t the most popular topic. Think of things you’ve looked up online or wondered about. Think about things you know which are off the beaten track. Lionel trains? Your town’s traditions or landmarks? A particular product, book, author, body part or animal? Seek topics that haven’t been done to death.
• Research, research, research. Not only do you want to cover the most important things about your topic, but you should find and link to the best websites and videos on your topic.
• Organization. Make it clear what your page is about, where you’re going to take your reader, and what they’ll get out of your lens right in the introduction.
• See my top ten Squidoo tips for some other ideas about how to make your lens stand out.
• Once in a while, make a list of ten webpages you’ve visited. Then write down the following. What brought you there? Did you read the webpage all the way through? What on the page held your attention?  If you clicked on any links, why did you click them? If you did NOT read the whole page, why? What did you skip? What did NOT hold your attention? Your tastes aren’t everybody’s, but the more you understand what keeps people on a page — and what doesn’t — the more you’ll be able to write successful webpages.

The bottom line: your lens has to be useful, entertaining and/or informative, NOT generic. You have to “earn” your traffic, as Seth puts it.

And then use as much SEO as you can to get your content found.

When you find a lens you like, ask yourself: WHY do you like it? You can get insights about building good lenses, articles, and blog posts by jotting down what on that lens worked for you, what didn’t. Don’t copy their content (please!), but learn approaches to presenting your own content in more effective ways.

Here is EditorDave’s Guam: Where America’s Day Begins lens.

What I Liked About This Lens

What I love most about this lens is the personal, unique content.

So much of the web is just regurgitating content someone else wrote, or providing bare-bones information that has no personal stamp. Dave’s writing about a topic he knows: where he lives! He gives his lens lots of life with his own experiences, his own photographs. That makes his page very different from a standard tourism lens, even though he may give less information about hotels, transportation and local attractions (instead, he links to sites on those).

Little details like typhoon-proof (or not so proof) architecture, the plants in his back yard, the “critters”, things to look for in old grade B movies filmed on Guam — make his Guam a real place. This is a first-person story.

Dave also mentions his other lenses on Guam without doing a ton of promotion for them. His writing is good enough, and his content is interesting enough, that I may really want to read more!

I also like his mix of his own photos and using Allposters.com to provide beautiful images to illustrate his content (rather than his content only being there to sell the posters).

Something That Works Here That Might Not On Another Lens

One thing EditorDave does NOT do is provide a Fancy Table of Contents. (Sorry.) That is, there’s no road map to tell us how long his lens is, what topics it’s going to cover, or where he’s going to take us while we’re visiting his lens. His writing is good enough that we don’t need it. I enjoyed browsing and being a tourist on his page.  On other lenses of this length, I’d probably want a road map.

Quibbles/Areas for Improvement

Dave could probably capture more clickthroughs— which boost lensrank and thus sales— by making some of the words in his lens clickable links. He mentioned a page about sea cucumbers at one point, but forgot to include the link. People can ignore links in your text if they want to, but don’t be shy about including links to related pages now and then, as long as you don’t go overboard with it— you never know when a visitor might turn out to be a huge sea slug fan!

There’s a number of links to dead auctions –probably an artifact of this being an old lens.

The one thing that didn’t work for me is the Ebay and Amazon modules. The lists were long, I didn’t get the impression that Dave actually had picked out the products in them, and I didn’t feel like clicking on them. I just wanted to get back to Dave’s own writing. Then again, I’m not thinking of going to Guam, so I’m not a target customer for those products.

I think my experience — quickly scrolling past a long list of products to get to the “next part of the page” — is fairly typical of user behavior. You may have more success with fewer products, more closely integreated into the content, using Amazon Spotlight or some other method to draw attention to them. It also helps when you include your own comments about books or products, so we know you picked them out yourself and have at least some reason for recommending them. But let’s face it — only a small percentage of visitors to any web page buy from it or click the sales module links.