How is traffic at Technologizer, you ask? I’m glad you did. It’s going really well. And a chart from Google Analytics covering September 1st through yesterday will tell the story better than I ever could:

Actually, I lied: This graph is deceptive, since it looks like the site was flatlining at almost nothing until yesterday. In truth, traffic was in the hundreds of thousands of page views a month–not bad for a site that’s still in soft-launch mode. It’s just that yesterday’s traffic–a half a million page views or so–was such a dramatic leap that it dwarfed the rest of the month into a form where it’s hard to see what was going on.

I first blogged on Technologizer on June 9th, to announce the site. But I didn’t post again until July 14th, which is when I began blogging in earnest. That was ten weeks ago. And the site looks like it will do a bit under a million page views in September–maybe more, if I’m lucky during the last few days of the month.

One story will contribute the majority of that traffic: “The 13 Greatest Error Messages of All Time.” Which is fine by me. Part of Technologizer’s recipe is to regularly publish blockbusters–stories that drive tidal waves of traffic our way. I thought this story would resonate with hundreds of thousands of people, and it did: On September 24th, it became the top story on Slashdot, and the hockey stick in the chart above was the natural result.

I launched Technologizer in part because I wanted to prove that an individual without much in the way of resources could produce content that did as well or better as that from big companies with lots of resources. “13 Greatest Error Messages,” which will likely generate a million or more page views all by itself in the weeks to come, is happy confirmation that I wasn’t completely insane.

How can you create a blockbuster story on the Web? I persist in the eccentric belief that it’s just not that hard:

1) Find the intersection of what you love and what large numbers of people might like–anything involving computer-related nostalgia is a good bet, for instance–and never write anything that doesn’t come from the heart or which you wouldn’t want to read yourself;

2) Write it in the form of a list if possible;

3) Don’t take yourself too seriously;

4) Don’t be stingy with links to other relevant sites;

5) Break it into multiple pages,but not so many that people think you’re forcing them to click, click, click;

6) Make sure that readers can chime in (”Greatest Error Messages” has generated 350 comments and 15,000 poll responses);

7) Make sure your site won’t choke on the traffic if it comes (Technologizer is hosted by Automattic , the creators of WordPress);

8) Get the ball rolling by telling social media sites like Digg and Slashdot, as well as bloggers who might be genuinely interested, that the story’s up.

That’s the strategy we pursued countless times at PC World. I simply replicated it with “13 Errors,” and once again it worked.

Next challenge for Technologizer: Do it again and again and again…sometimes more than once a month, so getting to two million page views in one month doesn’t feel like an impossible dream. I’ll keep you posted on how we’re doing.