Producing Great Inbound / Web Content

A huge topic for sure, but does anyone have any stories or input about making great content for your website?

I'm talking about the kind of content that encourages large numbers of tailored readers to descend on your website, pass links around, give you backlinks for SEO.

Partly it's just about being insightful and communicating this well, but do you guys have more specific tips from your experience? Have you had success with techniques such as explicit link-baiting? Any content that works particularly well for you?

I am particularly interesting about 'breaking through' when your target demographic is not particularly link happy.

There's not much magic here. We've increased our blog traffic by 250% in the last 3 months by focusing on 3 things:

1) Teach people, teach people, teach people. There's a ton of things people want to learn about and the odds are you know something about. Whether it's a behind the scenes of a business you run or information on how to run their own lives and projects better.

2) Raise up other people. Use your projects and your words to improve other people's projects. For example, help people use a 3rd party site or tool better. The world will return the favor.

3) Develop your own opinions and philosophies and share them. Look for the things where you go against the grain. Think poker or investing or Aikido. In all these things it pays to do what the crowd isn't doing, to do the opposite.

I'd also recommend reading "How to win friends and influence people" for tons of great brainstorming fodder for improving your influence online.