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Here are a few traffic-building tips that are worth reiterating. We’ve mentioned these things before, but if you’re not doing them, now’s the time.

1. Promote the heck out of that audio interview.
It’s fresh content and a different type of post than your run-of-the-mill news story reaction posts. Tell your potential readers about it in any way that you can! Engage with your community, since you have exclusive content that they might be interested in. Search Facebook and other social networking sites for groups that pertain to your topic. Don’t forget to check out Ning. There are more than 2,000 people in Ning’s social networking site for coffeehouse baristas. Your topic probably has a group, too.

2. Market your site in all your online endeavors.
Chances are you have accounts for lots of sites and Web services. Make sure each of those accounts is plugging your blog! Link everywhere: G-chat status, Facebook status and profile, Twitter profile and tweets, LinkedIn profile and–most importantly–your Medill Reports Author Profile Page. There are lots of other possibilities. Make your online identity work for you!

3. Comment, Comment, Comment, Link, Link, Comment, Comment
To paraphrase the Beatles, the comments you give are equal to the comments you take. If you leave comments on a lot of blogs, viewers of those blogs will check out your site and the owners of those blogs will definitely want to know who you are. If they like what they see, visitors will become comment-leavers who will become subscribers. Also, charity starts at home. Read and comment on each other’s blogs! Usually if someone sees that there is a comment on a post, they will read that post more closely, read the comment and be more inclined to join the conversation.

4. Sexy Titles
The power of a keyword in your post’s title cannot be understated. That keyword appears in your URL, which gets indexed by Google, which leads people to your site via search. Also, repeat customers would much rather read a post with an intriguing title than a dull one. Wouldn’t you?

5. Get More Tips
If you truly are obsessed with your page views and absolute unique visitor rates, there are lots of online resources with tips about improving traffic. I’ve been subscribed to ProBlogger for a few months now and I’ve read a lot of useful tips and tricks there. Check it out!

Tracking traffic on the Web is tricky business with serious implications for those that rely on accurate traffic numbers for their revenue. Which of the methods presented in the readings on Blackboard seem most reliable and where do you see the effort to bring uniformity to the numbers heading? Note: The articles are posted in Blackboard/Course Docs/Week Seven/Readings. Please post comments by class time May 12. 

Rich Gordon sends this along to us: “The 25 basic styles of blogging … and when to use each one.”  The blogs you are building for this class employ several of these styles, some of which can be very effective in drawing readers. See the “Buzz Index” for each. The list does not aim to be comprehensive, no sooner is this posted than another type of blog will emerge, perhaps defined by you.

Congratulations to all of you who work on The Windy Citizen, which received a well deserved tip of the hat yesterday from Steve Johnson at the Tribune. Johnson’s review was then picked up by Romenesko at Poynter Online. See also Romenesko’s link to Tim McGuire’s profile of Windy Citizen founder Brad Flora which includes good advice for all:

“Smart entrepreneurs (or, gasp, traditional media companies) are going to gather hundreds of these bright thinkers, give them that $100 grand and take half the profits. That’s the real future of news unless newspapers hire the Brad Floras out there and let them run. Their innovation and experimentation needs to be encouraged and nurtured, not stapled, spindled and mutilated to the point that they think like everyone else in a newsroom.”

How not to make a great video, from a guy who makes great videos.

(The embed code isn’t working, so here’s the link.)

The founder of Monster.com, Jeff Taylor, is planning the launch of an online obituary site. In the article, Taylor is quoted as saying that he’s built his career on migrating the newspaper to the web, piece by piece. The piece he’s missing is the obit section.

This week you reviewed copyright guidelines and watched Stanford’s Lawrence Lessig discuss new ways of understanding copyright law. How is copyright changing and how much should it change?

Check out this Editor and Publisher story about the all-important “time spent” metric. If your visitors spend more than seven minutes on your site, congratulations! You’re beating the Chicago Tribune!

E-Media Tidbits, a Poynter blog about guess what, online media, has a post about journalists rebelling against changes in media techniques. Has some interesting perspectives on the nature of journalism and new approaches.

Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry

The fundamental goal of findability is to persistently connect your audience with the stuff you write, design, and build. When you create relevant and valuable content, present it in a machine readable format, and provide tools that facilitate content exchange and portability, you’ll help ensure that the folks you’re trying to reach get your message.

A website that ignores findability is whispering into the wind, hoping that someone passing by might catch a hint of its message. To further complicate the chances of reaching your target audience, a cacophony of other websites are vying for the same commodity—attention.