Basics:
When a certain entity points in one direction and starts moving. This creates traffic, may it be on the highway, a road, or even honey bees. Obviously as more and more join in, it creates momentum and this in turn creates an influx of traffic at the intended target.

When we apply this theory to a website, what do we get? Traffic from a number of curious, interested and sometimes aimlessly browsing surfers.

To spice up a situation, if there was some kind of a scandal then the traffic that starts to generate becomes so huge that sometimes the server that is hosting that site becomes clogged up or goes down unless of-course it has a lot of bandwidth to support this traffic.

The Scandal
Anything juicy, noisy and irresistible will definitely have an effect. Most times even if you talk about your neighbor sleeping with your other neighbor will have this effect. The best results are achieved if these neighbors are singers, movie stars or just plain old famous.

Traffic magic!
Provided you have a decent number of readers and those readers you are bound to get some very good results.