1. Someone has posted your link on Facebook or Twitter: there’s nothing like getting a personal recommendation.  Plus, there’s something about seeing a link in my “stream” that makes me want to click it. I can’t help myself.

2. Your site design is clean and uncluttered: I don’t care how good your content is, if I click on a link and it takes me to a site that’s busy, packed with ads, and generally unreadable, I’ll usually leave. It takes effort to read something; don’t make it harder for me to concentrate. 

3. I can view your content nicely on the iPhone: I do a lot of reading on the bus. Everyday, i have two hours to kill on my commute, and I use that time to visit recommended links. The iPhone has a pretty nice browsing experience; but I’ve noticed some sites with inflexible layouts that keep fonts small, and columns wider than my small screen will allow (without side scrolling). The best option is if you can create mobile specific CSS. Oh, and if you have annoying pop-up ads take those off.

4. There’s some good non-clipart images included with the article: paragraph after paragraph of text with no eye candy looks boring.  Spice things up with an image or two, especially if your article is long.  Surprise me: put an image in your content that makes me go “Huh? What?” and then drives me to read the text so I can have the image explained to me.

5. It’s not too long: long articles are overwhelming.  We live in an age of information overload – say what you need to say, and say it succinctly.