I’m not a web designer or developer. But as a blogger and a marketer in a wide variety of niches, I’m always on the lookout for the types of content that do well in a given industry.
I was curious as to what types of content get a lot of traffic in the web design and development niches. So, I looked at popular social media sites that have a design and development section. I researched social media sites that cater to web designers and developers. And I checked out popular web design and development blogs to see what they were linking to. Here’s what I found.
For both web design and development, tutorials and lists make up a big part of the high traffic content. One smart author even combined the two. He published 10 Seriously Useful Photoshop Tutorials and got a lot of traffic.
It makes sense that tutorials are popular since web design and development are both “how to” niches. Web designers and developers are looking to learn new things and tutorials are great learning resources. The key to making a quality tutorial is to be detailed. Make sure each step in your tutorial is covered well and include screenshots so that the reader knows exactly what you’re doing.
Surprisingly, I didn’t see any video tutorials except this one. That could be because many people are not creating them. I think they could be popular as the video I linked to did pretty well. If you have some screencast experience, try creating a screencast tutorial and see where it goes. You may start a trend.
Lists do well in any industry but for some reason, web designers really like lists. Whether it’s 22 cool fonts, 46 sites to inspire you in the hand drawing style, or 50 Creative 404 Pages, web designers find lists useful, inspiring, and/or entertaining.
For web developers, cheatsheets or reference guides seem to be popular. If you’ve created one or found one that’s been useful for you, you should write about it. They help beginners and even more experienced web workers.
Finally, cool web apps get a lot of traffic. If you’ve created one or know about one, let the world know. If you can give an in-depth review of the web app, that’s even better.
Much of marketing and promotion today is heavily based on content, so if you’re not publishing any of the above types of content, you’re missing out on a lot of traffic.
Over to You
What types of content has sent you a lot of traffic?
What types of content do you like to read?
