Negative Writing Triples Your Traffic
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Lets talk about the no.1 searched person of all time: Paris Hilton.
1. When Paris Hilton was sentenced to serve 45 days in prison, one of her fans started an online petition to Free Paris Hilton.
2. At the same time, an entrepreneur started a petition website of his own: Jail Paris Hilton.
3. The results? The Jail Paris Hilton petition got more than three times as many names as the Free Paris Hilton petition!
a_?Nothing travels faster than light, with the possible exception of bad news, which follows its own rulesa_? - Douglas Adams
One sure fire way of attracting more traffic to your blog is by writing posts with a negative point of view. Open any newspaper and you’ll see that the top headline is almost always negative.
Negativity spreads. How can you use it to win people’s attention and get others to link back to you?
De-construction 1: At the time of writing this, the top 2 headlines on Digg.com are:
i. In case you weren’t really sure AT&T really is spying on you
ii. 6G iPod UI video: Apple’s new interface?…Apple Legal Department Involved!
De-construction 2: My title for the blog post where I review MyBlogLog is “Removing MyBlogLog Increases Adsense Earnings!” If you read the post, you’ll see that there are 3 bullet points both for and against MyBlogLog. But by using a negative title, more people linked to the post and commented on it.
De-construction 3: Read this blog post: The Three Little Blogs: A Cautionary Tale. It was linked by several bloggers within a short span of time. It was one of the hottest blog post of last week. Do you think that that post would have spread like wild fire without the negative slant and linking “big bad blog” to JohnChow.com?
Action Summary:
Try to give a negative angle to your writing whenever you can and more people will talk about your blog posts.
If you liked this post, buy me a beer. (Suggested: $3 a beer or $7.5 for a pitcher)Spread the word:
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It might triple your traffic, but it all adds to the amount of negativity in the world. One thing I like about blogs, is that it isn’t totally infested with negative stories, like the media is.
Posted 23 Jul 2007 #
Paul: Thanks for your thoughts. While I don’t disagree with your sentiment, I would like to make a clarification.
You can provide a positive message with a negative headline too. There is a difference between taking a negative slant to create a buzz and hateful writing. If you click on links in De-construct 2 and 3, you will see that both those posts are positive in nature - they help the readers.
Posted 23 Jul 2007 #
Yes sure. I don’t call it hateful, and I’ve used the trick of negative headlines myself before, so I don’t want to sound too preachy about it. No doubt it does increase traffic. Still I’m not too fond of the idea of contrived negative headlines. Headlines govern a lot of peoples perceptions, far more then content does in my opinion. Well la dee da! I better move on:)
Posted 23 Jul 2007 #
Yes, I do think it would have spread like wildfire. You know, because I’m just that brilliant…lol.
Seriously, if the title of your post had been Adding MyBlogLog Increases Adsense Earnings, most people probably would have assumed it was some sort of advertisement or plug.
And…for some reason, fear and sex are big sellers. The fear factor definitely works, and although I’ve never consciously applied that to my blog, it is there. People have anxiety that they are doing something wrong and need reassurance that they aren’t or knowledge to fix the problem. I think a lot of headlines in the national media reflect this.
Posted 23 Jul 2007 #
It is indeed a debatable topic. I think a healthy mix of negative and positive with the +ve proportion more than the -ve is the need of the hour.
Of course where there is positive there is a negative subscript attached with it.
Our perception is responsible to give the post a +ve or a -ve dimension.
Posted 24 Jul 2007 #
Hmm…I shall try this trick in one of my columns in my blog.
Posted 02 Aug 2007 #
[…] diesem Artikel hat mich Ankesh Kothari mit seinem Blog inspiriert. Darin vertritt er die These, dass man mit negativen Nachrichten den Traffic auf dem […]
Posted 16 Aug 2007 #
[…] diesem Artikel hat mich Ankesh Kothari mit seinem Blog inspiriert. Darin vertritt er die These, dass man mit negativen Nachrichten den Traffic auf dem […]
Posted 18 Aug 2007 #
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Posted 15 May 2008 #