As you may have read in some of my colleagues’ posts on this blog already, there has been a slight shift in the way we do things here. Instead of monthly posts, we’re moving to a quarterly schedule instead. For this quarter, I’m going to chat about how to you can get more traffic to…

If you’re a reader of this blog, you’re likely aware of the empathy challenge that has been given recently to all Automattic designers. Pick a colleague’s post, and explain why you chose that one. Outline a plan for the post to get 1,000+ views. Imagine that you have a US $20 budget to work with.…

The design teams at Automattic like to do periodic exercises called Empathy Challenges. The goal in these exercises is to get us thinking in our customers’ shoes, to understand their contexts and challenges. This exercise in particular is about understanding how our customers might take an existing post and grow the audience with just a…

For this exercise, I wanted to embrace both how little I know about driving web traffic, as well as the two-hour time limit. While I could spend hours researching and learning the best way to drive traffic to my existing content on a blog, realistically I know that most people won’t have time to do…

I don’t know anything about traffic. Or marketing even, really. My site gets six visitors a day, and most of those seem to be driven by Google searches for “reasons for not picking up the phone” and “best painkiller for broken bones”. (Apparently I am the internet’s foremost expert on hating the telephone. Not sure…

You’re a small business owner. You created a website that showcases your services, provides contact information, and of course its regularly updated via your blog. You have been posting for a few months and have recently seen an uptick in business as a result. Its a very small increase, but you want to build on…

It’s a new year, and designers at Automattic have been pondering a common question that all bloggers face: how can I get more views? I decided to take a look at this question by examining one of my best friend’s blogs, Southern Ohana, hosted right here on WordPress.com. We’ve been friends since middle school, and…

It’s a little difficult to outline how to grow an audience for posts that didn’t start out with that intention. Majority of the posts we’ve collected via A8CDesignFlow (& voice) has not be crafted for general consumption, most skew towards internal reflections or broad statements about the design process—which is great—but less relevant as marketing…