That’s just one lesson I learned since starting this blog a year ago. I still consider myself an advanced beginner, but I’ve picked up enough over the past 12 months to want to share. Here’s what I’ve learned:

Sex sells. Good headlines attract attention, whether they’re in a newspaper or a blog post.  That’s one of the biggest things I’ve learned from Twitter, which limits users to messages of 140 characters, forcing them to be catchy and concise. Recently I’ve been channeling Cosmo to come up with blog post titles like Work smarter, not harder, Write like a pro and Beat the recession. Big caveat: once you’ve got people’s attention, though, you gotta give them something worth reading.

Mix it up. The best blogs offer a variety of types of posts, a blend of news, how to’s, first-person experiences, round ups based on other people’s opinions or experiences, Q & As, pointers to great material on other blogs, lists, “best of’s” and just enough off topic material to keep things interesting. Offering a variety of material keeps things from feeling stale – and gives a blog a personality.

When writing a new post, include links to old ones. A couple weeks back I wrote about my picks for top 10 digital media trends for 2008 and included a bunch of links to older posts.  Not surprising, many of the older posts I linked to got a nice a bump in page views. What was surprising, though, was the overall number of old posts were getting click throughs at the same time. So I counted – 104 of the 226 posts I wrote in 2008 had been viewed that week. That’s almost 50 percent. There is something to the long tail theory after all. One of the reasons is…

Evergreen topics have an incredibly long shelf life. My no. 1 most popular post of 2008 was a list of best blogs for writers I did last February. It still gets a couple click throughs a day. That’s something to remember when thinking of subjects for new posts. There’s no need to re-invent the wheel, just revise posts that worked well the first time. Especially if you’re committing to posting every day of the week. Which brings me to the next lesson learned.

More is better. I was contemplating cutting back to three times week from five times a week in 2009, following the advice of 4-Hour-Work Week author Tim Ferris to let posts percolate through the blogosphere to build momentum and readership. Now I don’t think I will. The guys at ProBlogger advocate posting multiple times a day on the theory that the more you write, the more traffic you get to your site. That’s holding true for me.

Need a break? Recycle. Twice this year when I’ve gone on vacation I’ve run “Best of” compilations of three to six posts related to a common theme. This post, Work smarter, not harder is a compilation of seven posts I did earlier in the year on some aspect of being more productive. It works: click throughs for that and other “Nest of” posts I did was exceptional. In fact, the weeks my “Best of” compilations ran my blog had some of its biggest traffic days ever.

It’s all about community. If you’re using a blog to build a brand, platform or business, you want people to know about it and the best way to do that is to circulate in your virtual community. Befriend bloggers writing about the same thing you do and leave comments on their blogs or write guests posts. Join blog rings. Use Twitter. Make it easy for people to interact with your blog by adding all of the RSS and subscription bells and whistles. Caution: there’s nothing worse a blogger whose only aim is self promotion. Be real, and give back.

The past year has served as something of a learning curve for me. Now it’s time to get serious. That hit home after I started using Twitter a couple weeks ago and have seen traffic to my blog increase as a result. I’m kicking myself for not putting some kind of income-generating mechanism in place before now – especially with the publishing industry going down the tubes and taking freelance writing opportunities with it. So I’m moving that to the top of my 09 to-do list, which means buying a domain name, porting the blog to a hosted service, finding a designer, figuring out what to sell, etc. Hmm, sounds like fodder for a bunch of new blog posts.

But enough about me. For any fellow bloggers, what have you learned over the past year?

In online news circles, there’s been an ongoing discussion of links as news and links as reporting. The creators of Publishing 2.0, a blog about how technology is transforming the news, are huge advocates of what I’ll call link journalism. They wrote definitive article art this called Reinventing Journalism On The Web: Links As News, Links As Reporting. They later wrote this piece explaining how a New York Times article on John McCain really missed the boat because the reporters didn’t take the opportunity to link to what else was out there on the same subject.

So what does all of this mean to freelance writers? You’re only as smart as your links. You don’t live in a vacuum. If your posts don’t have links, what does that say about your ability to do research on your topic?

It’s not hard to do Google searches and find something that relates to what you’re writing. But if you’re really good, you’ll be able to pick through the chaff to find the stuff that best underscores your point, or even helps make your point. Whatever you may think of Penelope Trunk, the contrarian career coach who blogs as the Brazen Careerist, she is a link master. Her blog posts are chock full of references to academic research supporting her sometimes wacky theories. And she never misses an opportunity to link back to her past posts. That’s smart because people click on the links to read them and that ups her overall Website visitor numbers.

The most popular post I’ve ever written for WordCount was on the best blogs for writers, which was essentially a list of links. But it wasn’t just any list. It was a list I’d culled from ideas a bunch of writers submitted that I carefully read through and then sorted according to the type of blog, and then edited down to the very best, and then wrote about. Even though I wrote it back in February, according to my stat counter, at least a handful of visitors read it every day. That’s proof of the power of the well-placed link.