Secrets All Thieving Thread Masters Must Steal from the Blog Wizards

[Joe Ward]

• Rebecca Kelley of SEOMoz outlines wisdom from 3 years of blogging.
• Blog writing strategies can be applied directly to thread writing:
  
  • Ask questions. Yes or No?
  • Review & comment on existing articles (when you're short on material or time)
  • Get a little creative with your writing (styles make fights)
  • Use shorter, sharp witted titles, like movie names (but don't forget the keywords)
  • Use humor (be somewhat conservative, unless offending on purpose)
  • Go offbeat on occasion (to mix it up)
  • Use analogies to make concepts easier to grasp (and more attractive to the reader)
  • Use some interesting stats (Top 7.5 Mistakes 15.9% of vBSEO Users make before boosting their traffic by 479%)
  • Choose topics that "polarize" or pit different high interest groups up against one another (set the stage for the great debate).
  
  

I've added some liberties above. See Rebecca's article for more in depth insights.

Remember - it's not just about massive quantities of content. If you build a great forum, your users will take care of that. Following the principles above will help you attract and retain those content rich users! They'll read, sign-up to comment, comment, link to it, and click you over other results in the search engines. It's a win-win-win-win-win situation for you.

Think: Link Bait

[tavenger5]

I do the above all the time, mostly with asking questions that I may or may not know the answer to. The result is a listing on a google SERP and traffic for that page. Here's a good example:
multiple lines on tmobile - Google Search

(first result)

[Joe Ward]

That's great. Do you also find that you get good link backs to those types of threads?

[tavenger5]

That's great. Do you also find that you get good link backs to those types of threads?

It depends - if the question is answered and good info exists in the thread, then yes. I've been seeing traffic from yahoo answers.

[kevinl]

This is a great thread!