How to get more traffic, according to Guido Fawkes

Blogging may not be an exact science, but if it was, Paul Staines would surely be its professor. He is the man behind the Guido Fawkes blog, detonator of the “digital dynamite” that was the e-mails between Damian McBride and Derek Draper, and his blog racks up more than 100,000 hits a day.

Paul Staines, who created Guido Fawkes as an "overdeveloped caricature"

At the Voices Online blogging conference yesterday, Staines divulged his top tips for bringing in blog traffic. “You’ve got to make non-mainstream media more mainstream,” he said. “You can’t write about highfaluting boring stuff all the time. You don’t see newspapers only writing about serious things.”

His three commandments for blogging brilliance are:

• “Don’t comment on comment” -  the “most boring” of all sins

• “Update regularly” – with original material

• “Don’t forget novelty” – keep content fresh and varied

And if anyone knows what works, it’s Staines: he also told the conference that he would never become a newspaper journalist because he “couldn’t take the pay cut”.

He added that the Guido Fawkes character is an “overdeveloped caricature” of himself, invented because “it’s quite good branding and I didn’t want to embarrass my wife”.

For more of my coverage of Voices Online, you can read about why the Guardian’s Andrew Sparrow thinks blog readers are like ‘particularly aggressive sub-editors’, how an ‘internet black hole’ is operating in the Middle East and why Guido Fawkes and Mick Fealty disagree about Twitter, all on Journalism.co.uk.