The Nieman Lab has a fantastic post on Joel Kramer, the founder of MinnPost.com.

The parts that really stand out to me are the parts about building traffic and creating content on the Web. In general, Kramer recommends more, shorter posts. The days of piecing together several pieces of information into one summary may be over:

Even for our serious audience, we’ve learned that $600 spent on one long story produces a lot less traffic than $600 spent generating six to 12 shorter items. We still do longer stories every day, including many that combine in-depth reporting and analysis with personal voice.

But a careful reader of our site over the past year will note that we have a great many more short, quick hits, published all day long. So while we are spending less on news today than a year ago, our traffic has more than doubled during that time. On a three-month rolling average, we now have more than 200,000 unique monthly visitors and more than 700,000 page views — and in mid-February we enjoyed our first 31-day period with more than one million page views.

We are confident we can keep this number growing and keep quality high. Even short-form work can involve outstanding reporting and analysis — for evidence, check out David Brauer’s Braublog any day. But it does mean that we do a lot fewer ambitious investigative reports than I would like us to publish.

Tony Pierce gave us similar advice a few weeks ago. He recommends:

• He recommends posting more than once daily. If you post once a day or less, people usually don’t come to your site daily. They’ll just come once or twice a week to catch up. Not only do you want people coming to your site daily, you want them coming multiple times a day. Having someone come to your Web site twice daily is a big difference over twice weekly.
• Pierce also recommends group blogs, based around topics. Having multiple authors on one blog helps to ensure that there is a consistent stream of content. That consistent stream is vital to building traffic.

Kramer also talks about the delicate balance between generating page views and just producing content to get page views. Kramer and MinnPost.com seek to maximize page views by tracking what people like, while always keeping their mission in mind:

Google Analytics tells us exactly how many times each item we publish gets read. This has a powerful effect. It makes us want to do more of what gets read, and less of what doesn’t, while remaining true to our mission.

What does this mean? A glance at MinnPost lets a visitor know that it’s for serious newsreaders. Our brochure proudly declares, “NO Britney. NO Paris. NO Lindsay.” MinnPost is not a place to visit for stories about entertainment celebrities, or sex, crime, and advice for the lovelorn — even though we know that such content would bulk up our page views.

Back to Pierce for a second here. Pierce has a very simple formula for success:

Consistent content + links to the blog from other sources + SEO = increased page views.

I would combine that advice with what Kramer said, and you’ll be able to start building traffic in no time.