So you want to write a market blog

Blogging has grown wildly in popularity over the past several years, with over 50 million blogs registered. According to media research, 20% of all adults have read a blog in the past week. Trading-related blogs have kept pace. Sites such as Stock Blogs and Seeking Alpha reveal hundreds of blogs that cover topics ranging from technical analysis to economic commentary. The TradingMarkets site has itself begun a blog feature that covers trading and investing from a variety of perspectives.

Amazon's Alexa site provides a rough, if imperfect, view of the relative popularity of websites by ranking them in terms of traffic. A site with little traffic will receive a rating of one million or higher; a site in the top 100,000 is attracting a steady and sizable daily stream of surfers. It doesn't take long, playing with Alexa, to discover that most blogs are not generating much traffic. If you're an aspiring market blogger, what can you do to attract readers to your site?

I've had some practical experience with this topic, having begun a blog called TraderFeed in December, 2005. It's taken quite a few months to get the site to the point where it consistently attracts thousands of readers a week and quite a few hundred unique users daily, with an Alexa ranking around 250,000. That's certainly not enough traffic to worry the likes of Google and Yahoo!, but it has succeeded in bringing me into contact with a variety of creative market professionals that I would never have met had I not joined the blogging community.

What makes for a good market blog? Here are a few observations from my blogging sojourn:

1) Consistency of output: Take a look at sites such as The Kirk Report, The Big Picture, Trader Mike, and Abnormal Returns. These bloggers provide unique content on a very regular basis, encouraging ongoing viewing. Their sites encourage readers to subscribe via syndication and thus build a loyal following. This is not easy. Maintaining an active blog is a bit like hosting a daily talk show: you are constantly challenged to provide unique content.

2) Unique perspectives: The worst blogs are those that emote without informing; that provide generic material ("this chart looks good"); and especially that tout products and services for sale. The best market blogs hit you with perspectives you wouldn't thought of yourself. Check out the entries on the CXO Advisory site and Ticker Sense, which admirably synthesize research for traders. Good blogs also organize existing material in fresh ways, as can be seen in John Mauldin's popular site.

3) Links: Blogging is about being part of a knowledge community. It is important to get that. Links do not substitute for fresh material, but they do provide depth and background to your topic, as in this article. Mutual linking is also an important element to building Web visibility and traffic. A good blogger thinks like a good team player in sports: your job is not only to excel, but to make others around you better as well. If you're successful as a blogger, you will help traders find resources they would have never otherwise encountered. For this reason, I devote an entire section of my daily personal blog to links.

4) Tracking readers: There are a number of services that help bloggers track how many readers they have, where they're from, how long they stay on the site, etc. This is extremely important, as it provides you with meaningful feedback about the features that readers find most valuable. It also helps you quantify the growth of your site more precisely than is possible with Alexa. I use a service called Sitemeter, which provides useful graphics and summaries on number of visitors, page views, etc.

5) Engaging style: Blogs are most popular when they provide short posts on interesting topics and include an element of human interest. Highly technical blogs with lengthy entries may be valuable, but generally will not attract a large audience. Many top-rated blog sites incorporate humor, personal perspective, and other engaging features. Here's an entry that brought many visitors to my blog; it has many of the elements of a successful post. Do pay attention to the blog title: it is a major factor in attracting links and placement within search engines.

My best advice is to clearly identify *why* you want to do a blog. The best reason is to join a community of bright, inquisitive, creative professionals and benefit from the mutual association. The worst reason is to create a form of advertising or a platform for selling ads. To be sure, there are blogs written by vendors of trading products that are quite good. Invariably, these support users of the products by providing education as to new and creative applications; see the blog from Trade-Ideas for example. Ultimately, when you're a blogger, you're an author and your success hinges on the value of your material. If you have a lot to share in a community context, you'll find yourself richly rewarded when others return the favor.

Brett N. Steenbarger, Ph.D. is Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, NY and author of The Psychology of Trading (Wiley, 2003). As Director of Trader Development for Kingstree Trading, LLC in Chicago, he has mentored numerous professional traders and coordinated a training program for traders. An active trader of the stock indexes, Brett utilizes statistically-based pattern recognition for intraday trading. Brett does not offer commercial services to traders, but maintains an archive of articles and a trading blog at www.brettsteenbarger.com and a blog of market analytics at www.traderfeed.blogspot.com. His book, Enhancing Trader Performance, is due for publication this fall (Wiley).