Short Term Content
Writing short term content is a quick and easy way to generate traffic and add pages to your site. It's easy to find ideas for short term content. All you have to do is look at Digg, Techmeme, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Twitter, or any news site. The reason this content is labeled "short term" is that it isn't going to be valuable for a long period of time. I distinguish short term from long term at the one year mark. If a piece isn't going to be relevant a year from now, it's classified as short term.
What are the different kinds of short term content? Let's take a look.
News
Check Google News for stories that are emerging in your niche. If you write an article on the latest news you can get a lot of traffic in a hurry, but the problem is that yesterday's news doesn't generate a lot of interest from searchers. If you want to keep your traffic numbers up you kind of have to hop on the treadmill and work really hard cranking out a lot of content all the time.
If you are going to post a lot of news content, try to get included in Google News. It won't take any extra work on your part, but you will see an increase in traffic. However, in my experience these visitors won't give you high conversion rates, but it certainly isn't going to hurt you in any way.
Another benefit from news content is that if you are one of the first to write about an event, you could get yourself a bunch of links and links are very important for SEO.
Seasonal
Content on seasonal topics tends to last a little longer than news stories do. You can get a few months of traffic out of these articles. What's hot this Christmas season is always a good one, a TV series that is airing, or writing about a particular sport.
Trends/Fads
Trends are similar to seasonal topics, but have to potential to last much longer. Popular music, toys, video games, electronics, styles, and more can last for a long period of time if they are popular with a wide group of people.
Cycles
With short-term content you can benefit from cycles. If you write something on Charlie Sheen going to rehab you might find yourself getting a spike of traffic as he enters a second or third time. Each time a season of a TV show comes back on the air you can get traffic for pieces you wrote the year before. If you wrote about Halo when it first came out, you might see a spike in traffic with each subsequent release.
It's important to remember that you might see a spike in traffic when topics cycle, but is what you wrote still relevant? People want up to date information so if you are specifically writing about tips for beating Halo 2, visitors will be expecting something different when Halo 3 comes out.
Length
You need at least 100 words of content to have a realistic chance of getting into the index, but 250 or more words actually written on the topic works best (don't count text advertisements you throw in or links to related content at the bottom). This will ensure that your content is unique enough from the other stuff on your site.
Indexing
How fast is your site getting indexed? If you don't have a lot of links coming in and the search engine spiders aren't finding your content very fast, then you might be wasting your time. If you post a news story and it doesn't get included in the index for several days, it may no longer be relevant and you won't get any of the traffic benefits.
Cost
Short term content can be more expensive to produce than long term content even if the word count shorter and you either pay the author less or it doesn't take you as long to write. The higher cost comes from not reaping as big of a reward. These articles will not be popular for very long, so you won't get as much out of them.