It might be the content. It might be the icons. It might be the SEO. I have no idea.

There was a time in my life when people looked to me as some sort of “web marketing guru” because I had success with ClickZ. There was even a time when I believed my own bullshit in that regard. But various experiments and experiences over the years have truly humbled me. The fact of the matter is: I have no idea what the magic formula is that drives thousands of people to your web site or blog.

Today my friends at 37 Signals posted a piece called “It’s the Content, not the Icons“. They were responding to the increasing trends of bloggers to post little icons to Digg, Reddit, Netscape and every other social news network on every article they write in a desperate attempt to get people to vote for whatever post they happen to be reading, hopefully driving up their rankings on these other sites (and ultimately Google) so that their site will get more traffic and more of their articles will get read.

Everybody wants to become the next TechCrunch, Scobleizer, Winer or Calacanis (preferably Calacanis because Jason made $25M from his sale to AOL).

No sooner did 37 Signals post their missive than “RandFish” at SEOMOZ.org posted a strong retort:

To me, his post is generally awful. The examples he uses to back up his assertion that those buttons are ineffective is overly narrow and shows no real data supporting or rejecting his assesment. He proceeds to make his primary issue with the buttons the “priority” of the websites using them. He appears to be arguing that you can either you spend your time placing social bookmarking buttons on the bottom of your pages OR build great content. This is utter nonsense - if you ask for the 15-minute feature addition of social buttons to your blog template from a developer, you really aren’t cutting into content-development time.

My tendency is to go with Matt Linderman of 37 Signals on this one… Not because I have any empirical evidence to prove RandFish wrong, but my own experiences with this blog and others seem to point in the direction of creating solid content first and foremost, and worrying about the other stuff later.

I’ve learned a few things by tracking the traffic on this blog and others which make little differences on how your site traffic will perform.

1) If you post, they will come. If you don’t, they won’t. So obvious, but the thing to keep in mind here is that no matter how well you are ranked in the search engines or being picked up by Digg, etc — it only seems to make a difference on today’s traffic.

2) Search engine traffic impacts you incrementally, but doesn’t really make a big difference on today’s numbers.
People go to search engines searching for information on particular issues or topics, and you may have written about one of those issues or topics a while back and might get some of those folks visiting you because of that. Will they then come back regularly because they like your site? Possibly. But because we on the internet all suffer from one form or another of A.D.D., the chances are better that they’ll forget you and move on to the next site, forgetting you were ever there.

3) Getting a big boost from the news sites might help you today, but may not do much for the long run. Again, for the same reasons above. People forget. I was absolutely thrilled this weekend and earlier this week when 6 posts that I wrote got picked up under the “Discussion” area for a number of the leading articles on TechMeme. You want to know how much traffic I picked up? None.[UPDATE: I take that back. Techmeme was responsible for 7.3% of my traffic to be precise.] The numbers were no different than any other day when I post to this site. I dropped Gabe Rivera of TechMeme a note about my excitement of getting picked up by Techmeme, he wrote back and said that I probably figured out by now that it didn’t make me famous. Nope, it didn’t. And my servers didn’t get overwhelmed either. The only way that one gets serious traffic from leading news sites like Techmeme is by nailing a LEAD article — a headline that other people comment about. And do it again and again and again. And the only way you can do that is through coming up with a breaking news item, a startling insight, an interview from an industry luminario — in short, only through GREAT CONTENT served up consistently, again and again and ag.

4) The buttons you really need on your site are for RSS feeds. It’s only when people check back on your content every time you write something that your traffic truly begins to grow. And people can be very fickle about what they keep in their RSS feeds. If you aren’t producing, they’ll cut you off their list quicker than you can blink an eye.

5) What you really need is good word of mouth, strong buzz. Without it, you’re in the long tail ghetto. And that again, happens only when you are consistently producing great content. Content worth talking about. Content that makes the reader feel “on the inside” or particularly insightful or “in the know” when they quote you.

And that’s hard to do…

Come to think of it, it IS the content. It’s got to be good. It’s got to be consistent. It’s got to be consistently good.

All the rest is bells and whistles.