Inbound links from extremely popular sites can do wonders for blog readership. The slashdot and digg effects are known to bring down under-prepared servers. That kind of traffic can be a boon for readership.
Research
Follow some of the most popular bloggers and figure out what they like. Look for trends and general areas of interest.
Narrow down a topic
There are probably things in your museum that would interest some of the bigger bloggers out there. You just have to figure out what they are and put them together in a way that appeals to them and their readers. Most museums have a veritable plethora of content in their archives. Expose some of it in a new and appealing way.
Make sure the presentation is tight
Have your media ducks in a row. Make sure you have ample images, video, sound, documentation in your post to give potential visitors enough information. Make sure your story is well worked out, but not over-produced. Casual and concise is best for blogging.
Send a carefully crafted note
If you want the story posted on a big name blog that is not a social site, you'll have to send a note to the editor. See a suggestion for that in CultivatingLinkers.
Seed some diggs/links
If you're trying to get the story highly ranked on a social news site like Digg or Reddit, have a few friends Digg it. Start some momentum. Keep in mind there is a fine line between having some colleagues help a story out versus spamming and gaming the system.
Bandwidth and Servers
If your entry takes off, be ready for some server meltdown. If your site is hosted with a blogging service like blogger, there isn't much to worry about. If you're sharing hosting make sure you have a reputable host that can provide a lot of bandwidth and handle server load.
If you're running your own server, there are a couple things you can do to take the brunt of incoming server requests.
- Host images and media elsewhere
- Flickr
- Youtube
- Use caching
- squid proxy sever if necessary
- WP-Cache plugin works wonders for wordpress
Keep an eye on things as your site gets hammered. Don't become a statistic of the slashdot or digg effects.
Have content waiting in the wings
If you produce a seriously popular story and get a lot of incoming traffic, hopefully you'll see a fair amount of conversion to subscriptions. Keep those new subscribers by having new content waiting in the wings. Keep your new readers interested. Consider updating your original story with more info as it develops or as traffic goes up.
See also:
Portrait Of A New Site Getting On Digg
DiggBait 101: 8 Ways to Help You Get to Digg’s Front Page