Reaching content critical mass: when to start pushing for traffic on your blog

Everyone knows that when you first launch your site or blog, you will not have any traffic. No-one knows you're there, no-one links to you and it's difficult to find you.

We also know that content is king, both in terms of attracting people (and attracting repeat visitors), and for the search engines, which base relevance on content among other things. The big question is, how much content do you need to "launch"?

I stumbled over the following article, which provides some useful rules of thumb, both to help provide some milestones to work towards and to set expectations to avoid disappointment when the hits don't start rolling in when you only have one article: http://blog4smallbusiness.com/2009/01/19/seo-for-blogs-content-is-king/.

I recommend reading the full article for various blog SEO tips (search engine optimisation), but here are the very high level key milestones for reference:

• 10 pages - enough to launch the site but don't expect any traffic
• 50 pages - search engines might start to take a bit of notice if you're lucky - good case scenario generates 300+ visitors per day
• 150 pages - critical mass - if you've done all the right things in terms of writing lots of relevant content of a similar theme and doing all the SEO stuff, this article reckons you could move up to 3000 unique visitors per day (sounds high to me, but I will let you know when I get to that many pages)
• 3000 pages - expect lots of traffic, especially if you're well optimised, articles are all thematically consistent and you've been doing the SEO stuff like getting links from other blogs etc.

I found this very interesting and useful stuff - hope you do too...