How to Make Your Site or Blog Sticky Without Trying Hard

Yahoo! Finance writer Penelope Trunk is no stranger to the type of scathing criticism blog readers have become accustomed to leaving in comments. Readers called her recent post, "Seven Ways to be a Better Delegator" obvious, far-from-groundbreaking, run-of-the-mill drivel. To be fair, many commented that it was better than her usual work, or as one person phrased it, "uncharacteristically unstupid." The interesting thing is that these readers obviously follow her column even though they find it consistently trite. It's somewhat similar to the way workers get more productive when they all hate their manager together. People like to be on the same page -- whether they praise or insult it.

Even if her work is uninspired, you have to hand it to Penelope; she obviously succeeded in building an impassioned community. Kathy Sierra, founder of javaranch.com, suggests the key to growing a passionate user community is to push beginning commenters from the asking-questions phase into the answering-questions phase. Perhaps the lesson here is that a successful blog should plant a seed but leave readers enough to run with. Or maybe it's that a site's "stickiness" is based on its ability to keep readers following content -- even if they're following to see how bad it is.

More Ways to Make Your Site Sticky:

Intelligent Design and Stickiness
Make Your Site "Sticky" Using New Tech Tools
10 Ways to Make Your Web site 'Sticky'
(Sticky image courtesy of mahalie, cc 2.0)