Here’s a question that nobody in the history of the internet has answered honestly: “Do you get all the traffic you’d like?”
The answer is always no. The person with 300 monthly visitors wants 3,000. The person with 30,000 wants 300,000. The person with 3 million wants the NYT homepage. Traffic hunger is the one appetite the internet never satisfies.
But here’s the emotional truth most traffic-chasers miss: the problem isn’t getting more people to your site. The problem is making your site worth arriving at. And then making it worth sharing.
I call it the Shareability Engine, the systematic practice of making your content so genuinely useful, interesting, and different that readers and influencers can’t resist passing it along. It’s the one traffic strategy that virtually every successful publisher uses. It doesn’t depend on algorithms. It doesn’t cost money. It gets more powerful in noisy, crowded environments.
And you absolutely do not need to be “big” to make it work.
The Prerequisite: Know What You’re Trying to Do
Before you optimize a single headline or tweak a single share button, answer this: what do you want your content to do?
What change are you trying to inspire? Who are you trying to reach? How should they feel? What should they do next?
If you skip this step, you’ll chase metrics that work against your actual goals. More eyeballs on the wrong content, attracting the wrong people, is worse than fewer eyeballs on the right content attracting the right ones.
Get your content goals straight. Then let’s talk about sharing.
Why Influencers Share
Influencers, those people with audiences you’d love to tap into, share content for one reason: it makes them look good.
They’re not sharing your work out of charity. They’re sharing it because they need a steady stream of high-quality material to serve their own audience. They’re always hunting. And if your content is worth serving, they’ll serve it.
Big publishers understand this intuitively. They obsess over making their content shareable because they know every share is a distribution channel they don’t have to pay for. Study the big sites you admire. Watch how they craft headlines, structure articles, and design experiences that practically beg to be passed along.
But here’s the nuance: it’s not always the biggest sites that drive the most meaningful traffic. A mid-sized publisher whose audience trusts them with fierce loyalty can send you visitors who convert at rates the big sites never touch. Don’t ignore the passionate niche in pursuit of the indifferent masses.
And then there’s your own army, the people who already love your work and want to look smart for sharing it with their friends. When you optimize for sharing, you’re helping them help you.
The Currency of Sharing
People share content for many specific reasons, but they almost all reduce to one:
People share content because it makes them look and feel smart.
Your content has to be good enough that sharing it is a net positive for the sharer’s reputation. Not miraculous. Just good.
What does “good” mean in practice? Three things:
- Useful, solves a real problem or answers a real question
- Interesting, offers a perspective or information that’s genuinely engaging
- Different, says something that hasn’t already been said a thousand times
You can occasionally skip Useful (though you shouldn’t make a habit of it). Interesting and Different are non-negotiable.
Boring content doesn’t get shared. Neither does the 47th competent-but-identical post on whatever topic is trending this week. The internet has enough “5 Tips for Better Productivity.” It does not have enough honest, specific, surprising takes from someone who’s actually lived the thing.
The Landing Test
Big blogs are obsessive about what happens after someone clicks through. What’s it like to land on your site for the first time?
Does the design communicate professionalism and care? Does the site load quickly? Can a new visitor immediately understand what you’re about and who you serve?
What content do they find? Does it speak to their problems? Do the headlines promise things worth exploring? (Remember, some people share based on headline alone. Make sure yours earn that trust.)
Can they get to your best material easily? Is your email opt-in compelling? And after they opt in, do they receive genuinely valuable material, or just a parade of pitches wearing a content costume?
You don’t need an editorial department or a design team to pass the Landing Test. You need to care enough to experience your own site through a stranger’s eyes.
Does it feel good to arrive?
No one with an ounce of influence will send their audience into a crummy experience. Provide a great one and the sharing takes care of itself.
The Ask
Two final words: just ask.
Ask your audience to spread the word. They often will. And when you create something perfect for a specific influencer, something that will make them look brilliant for sharing it, let them know about it. A polite nudge, used sparingly, is not spam. It’s professional courtesy.
The Shareability Engine runs on a simple fuel: make something worth sharing, make it easy to share, and then ask people to share it. Everything else is noise.
The algorithm will change. The platform will pivot. The hot new social network will rise and fall. But humans have been recommending things to other humans since we lived in caves and told each other which berries were safe.
Be the berry worth recommending.