As a Featured Travel Contributor on the Yahoo! Contributor Network, I am required to write at least three travel articles each month. Sometimes they do well. Sometimes nobody reads them. You never know which it’s going to be. For some reason, my article Day Trips from Kansas City, Missouri: The Flint Hills of Eastern Kansas is doing better than I would have expected. It’s not phenomenal by any means, but I’d like to figure out what I did right to generate more interest to see if I can incorporate those techniques into future articles.
Interestingly, I also wrote Day Trips from Kansas City, Missouri: Historic Abilene, Kansas at about the same time, but it isn’t getting the same interest. Both articles are about Kansas. Both mention the Flint Hills. I’m not quite sure what would be the difference. The only difference that I can really spot is that I included a link to the Flint Hills website in the article that’s doing better. It may be that because people are looking for inbound links to that website that I was then picked up and mentioned in several local news sites as well as a local Flint Hills blog.
I plan to go into the forums at Yahoo! to see if any of the Associated Content experts can help me identify why one article is more successful than the other.
Bob,
Thanks for writing about the Flint Hills. It’s a fascinating and important topic that has generated a lot of interest in recent years. I believe you are correct in thinking the mention in Bill’s Flint Hills blog improved the number of hits you received. The Flint Hills have been in the news recently, with discussions of wind farms and the new Flint Hills Legacy program from the US Fish and Wildlife Service. So the timing of your piece helped.