Every once in a while, I’ll have an epiphany while writing. The one I had this morning was a vision of how to build traffic on a website: ride a wave of popular topics. The fact is, if you’re not writing about the topics people are interested in, you just are not going to get the traffic. But if you do right about popular topics, you can find yourself enjoying a surge of visitors to your weblog(s). Learn how to ride the crest of a wave, and you can build up regular traffic and return visitors.

What do you write about, then? Well, it’s not so much what topic as what trend within a topic. Let me give you two concrete examples by way of explanation. First, my Curry Elvis site. It replaced my four old blogspot.com cooking blogs, and has been slow to pick up regular traffic beyond a trickle of search engine traffic. Then again, I haven’t been able to post all that frequently to the site. It’s a vicious cycle, if you get into to it: slowing down posting because of lack of traffic, lack of traffic due to reduced posting.

However, I started blogging about the Hell’s Kitchen reality TV series back last Fall. It’s the show where British Chef Ramsay screams at everyone and calls them fat cow or big boy (insultingly). If you haven’t seen it, you’ve missed a hugely popular show. But it wasn’t until the second season (which just ended the previous week) that it became really popular to watch.

So lately, search engine traffic for terms related to Hell’s Kitchen started to show up. To take advantage of queries for “Gordon Ramsay”, I also wrote about his more palatable (so to speak) show Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. This has created substantially higher average daily traffic, more comments, more ad clicks, more subscriptions to the web feed, and return visitors. In short, everything you want for your weblog.

Now if they actually have a third season for Hell’s Kitchen, my existing pages will have so much “authority” with search engines by the time the show airs that the pages will draw in exponentially more, as will any new pages that I write. So one idea is to pick a target that will be around for a few years. You’ll sacrifice your early efforts to get a return later. Patience is the key.

My second example is my music site. When I started writing this post a couple of hours ago, the traffic on my Sound Alchemy Online site was only about 25 page views for the day. I had to work on a couple of other blogs, but when I returned to this post, I checked my stats and in not much more than an hour, I had 135 pageviews and climbing.

Of course, that traffic is a pittance compared to other sites, but for a weblog with a small quantity of posts, and which only recently received a Google PageRank, it’s really starting to pick up. Unfortunately, it’s having a low conversion rate, probably because the contextual ads appearing just aren’t related to the topic. That takes time. Maybe I don’t have enough music-related keywords, since band names and song titles don’t necessarily trigger the right contextual ads.

What trend did I write about? Go see for yourself. It has to do with another reality TV series that’s airing around the time of this post.

Traffic surges are what happens when you pick a trendy topic within a topic, especially if there’s a TV component in there somewhere. I’m not writing about just music, but about a particular trend in music and TV. There might be a young generation who is supposedly spending more time online than watching TV, but there’s also a generation that both watches TV and surfs the Internet. These are probably the people visiting my music site right now.

They are not your only source of web traffic if you’re writing about TV, but just an example. You don’t have to write about TV, necessarily, but reality shows have so much hype that there seems to be a corresponding interest online. I normally despise reality shows, so I was hesitant to write about either one at first.

But I stumbled across Hell’s Kitchen and writing about seasons 1 and 2 helped build up enough traffic that I quickly started writing about the music reality show only two weeks ago or so - partway into the season, after I watched one episode and saw that it wasn’t half bad.

The trick now is to find a series of topics that you want to write about in succession, to build up long-term traffic. Hopefully, some of the resulting search engine visitors will turn into regulars, if you can keep writing interesting content.

Imagine that you are on a surfboard, riding the crest of a wave. That wave carries you forward quite a ways, if you can hang on, position yourself properly. Imagine that the crest is a the trendwave of a topic. Successful surfing requires discovering the right swells and getting on board. (Excuse my ignorance; I’ve never surfed, but that’s my understanding.)

Take that metaphor into the online realm. Discover a new swell (specific topic), before it becomes a wave (trend), and ride it (blog about it). When it does become a trend, the resulting web traffic will carry you forward.

What you want to learn to do is discover these swells on the fly, in succession. It’s not easy unless you know the broad umbrella topic fairly well. But you can develop the skills.

One last thing. If you’ve read any of my regular posts at either the Curry Elvis or Sound Alchemy Online sites, you’ll notice a distinct difference in writing style when I cover the reality TV shows. What do I do differently? I write off the cuff. I actually type as I watch the show. I describe what I’m watching so that a person who reads my post, who hasn’t seen the episode, gets a good idea of what happened. I don’t hold anything back, but I do tease a bit, to drive them forward into reading.

Whether the posts get read or not, I don’t know. What I do know is that when you try to describe an hour-long TV show, the resulting post is very long. If it’s coherent and natural, search engines that analyze it will give it authority because of the length and content, provided that the word frequencies aren’t weirdly skewed somehow.

Given that there are a few bloggers who have built up a tremendous following from just a few long posts each week, there’s something to be said for this technique. But only trial and error will teach you what works and what doesn’t. Good luck, and go catch a few swells.