Lessons from Mark Finkelstein

On Tuesday, our Independent Media class was visited by Mark Finkelstein, a conservative blogger. He got his start blogging for NewsBusters, a Web site that aspires to document and expose instances of liberal bias in the media. He later started his own personal blog, called FinkelBlog, but found that his personal site did not even close to the amount of hits his work for NewsBusters did. For that reason, his last post on FinkelBlog was July 28, 2009. The personal site still exists, but he has only posted on NewsBusters since then because it generates more hits due to linking on outside sites, including the Drudge Report.

This all begs the question: What can bloggers do to generate more hits to their blogs? Can personal blogs, like Finkelblog, ever compete with larger sites, such as NewsBusters? Should bloggers abandon smaller blogs in order to get more hits on other sites? Here's a few suggestions I had for generating some more hits: Actually break news. Link to other Web sites. Encourage reader comments to keep them on your site and interested in what you have to say. Use photos, videos, charts, and the like to make your blog more visually appealing. Optimize your blogs for search engines. And, of course, update frequently. Do you have any other suggestions?