11 Blogging Lessons From The Daily Mail Traffic Growth

Daily Mail Bin Campaign (Day 169) (Photo credit: adamwilcox)

The Daily Mail is the most popular newspaper online. The website of the British newspaper even beats the New York Times website traffic.

Let’s take a look at the key ingredients for the success of The Daily Mail and what lessons bloggers can learn:

• Publish news that people want to read. People love celebrities, people care about themselves. You will see a lot of content featuring celebrities and different health concerns.

• Focus on good stories, particularly human stories. Majority of Daily Mail stories is focused on people. Celebrities and non-celebrities in a wide range of different life experiences. Everyone can find something to relate to.

• Go global. Despite Daily Mail being a British newspaper, their website targets global audience. Thinking of domestic audiences and limiting your own blog on the Internet will not get you far in terms of traffic.

• Keep the design simple. Your visitors should not have to spend a lot of time working out how your site works. Keep it simple, Stupid!

• Create clickable headlines. Daily Mail articles feature pretty long headlines packed with celebrity names and other attractive keywords. 

• Use pictures. Use large pictures. Use lots of pictures. Many of the Daily Mail posts have only a few lines of text but include several large pictures.

• Caption the pictures. Daily Mail captions their pictures in funny and interesting ways. It’s kind of like writing an interesting headline for each of the pictures.

• Don’t just report on the news, spin it. You most probably cannot break the news but you can go deep into the news, find unique angles, spin it and make it interesting to read.

• More than 10 posts on the front page. This could boost search engine rankings but also make your visitors stick to the page longer as there is a bigger chance they will find something they like.

• More than top 10 most popular posts. They also feature many more posts in the sidebar than an average blog does. Again this means there is a bigger chance a visitor might find something she likes.

• Popular posts with pictures. Even in the sidebar Daily Mail uses a lot of pictures when showing their popular posts. They incentivise the reader to click with an image and few words about the story.

The Daily Mail content strategy focuses on entertaining and engaging content that people want to read. It features easy-to-scan and easy-to-read copy with lots of attractive pictures.

Definitely some food for thought for bloggers. Please do share this post if you found it insightful.