How I Got to Clout 8 on AC in Eight Months

I have been a content producer here since November 2006. I am already up to clout 8, and at the time I write this I have 34,552 page views. This isn't an astronomical figure; I'm sure many content producers have many more page views. I did climb clout levels faster than I expected, however. Along the way, I learned that this does not involve some magic marketing routine. Here is what I have done to increase page views and clout levels.

The first thing I have done is write a lot. I lost count of articles a while ago, but that number is definitely over 200. Most still get a few page views each month. I have found that some people will read a current article, get curious, and look at your older work. Having many articles out will increase the odds that someone will search for it also.

Secondly, I have a blog set up. A lot of what I write on there is not posted to AC but some is. I set up an RSS feed of my Associated Content work, and left it at that. I used to create a blog entry promoting a specific article but I found that wasn't worth the time.

I also submitted the URL for my content producer page to many search engines. I did this once. Search engines (at least some) typically crawl everything linked to the URL you submit so I found that continually submitting this URL to be unnecessary. This is also the reason I do not usually submit links to specific articles. I tried this with a few key pieces and did not see a jump in page views either.

I have also learned that you cannot easily predict what will get you many page views. You may think something will do well and it won't. Generally holiday pieces do well near that holiday, and news pieces receive a lot of page views initially (that number will fizzle out). Aside from those types of pieces, how well it will perform is anybody's guess. I used popular keyword lists in the past and found that they usually only helped me come up with a writing topic. These articles haven't given me unusually high page views.