With thanks to Chris Brogan (http://www.chrisbrogan.com/100-blog-topics-i-hope-you-write/) for the idea

In my experience, build traffic to a site is easy – it just takes work. The same goes for building a following on social media sites like Twitter or Facebook. If you’re willing to dedicate the time to posting regularly, promoting diligently, and continually learning new tricks, eventually everything will come together.

The questions that seem to be unanswered for the most part, revolve around what to do once one has traffic and “followers”.

The biggest blogs in the world measure their traffic in millions of visitors per day. Is this a natural built-in limit, or is there a way to increase this by orders of magnitude?

How does a blogger capitalize on traffic? Is it just ad revenue and possibly selling some merchandise or books? Are there revenue models still waiting to be discovered?

Are there better ways to connect with people via a blog? Is there a better model than Twitter for letting the whole world know what you are doing (without spamming!)? How can we create more value through the content that we write? Is there more to Twitter than just reposting links?

I don’t claim to have answers to these kinds of questions. And if you do, you’re probably not likely to tell me – you’re probably making too much money to give away your secrets!

I think at least part of the solution involves the following model though:

Create better / more interesting / more targetted content
Find better ways to categorize / tag / cross reference it so that there is underlying semantic meaning
Find better ways to allow the content to be found / broadcast / directoried
Find new and more relevant means for people to comment on, “riff on”, rip off, or otherwise respond to the content
Discover new models for turning it all into dollar bills
Figure out how content creators and content “consumers” (although everybody is a bit of both) can build better relationships with each other
Repeat.

I’m sure none of the above is original in any way manner or form. I’d love to hear what you think though!