The title is not “How to Create Controversy,” it’s “How to, Create Controversy.” Or should that be a semi-colon instead of a comma? I can never remember.
Based on purely unintentional and anecdotal experiences, I’ve come to the conclusion that if you want to drive more traffic to your blog and get more comments there are two ways to do it; publish “how to…” content, and create controversies.
Case in point, here are the articles on my blog that get, by a long shot, the most comments (not to be confused with the most traffic), in no particular order:
- Overstock.com – Example of Bad Advertising
- Not So Totally Awesome Computers
- Download Old Version of FireFox to Prevent Crashing, Freezing Up, Stalling in 2.0
- How to Uninstall / Rollback Windows Media Player 10
As for traffic, here are the top four most visited posts in order of which get the most traffic:
- How to Uninstall / Rollback Windows Media Player 10
- MWI’s Website Ripped Off Yet Again, for the Last Time
- Overstock.com – Example of Bad Advertising
- USPS Postcard Standards
I suspect if you were to analyze other blogs you’d find similar results. And I suppose it’s only logical, after all, people are more likely to comment on articles that are controversial because there are strong emotions involved, and people often go to the Internet searching for a fix for a specific problem, hence the success of the how-to lists. What I can’t seem to figure out is whether those pages generate more clicks per visitor on Adsense ads than other pages. If anyone knows how to find that data let me know. I can’t find the capability in Adsense itself.
You’ll like my article “8 Things to avoid while blogging” article in Connect this month, Josh. Touches on the same thing. [/shameless self plug]
Couldn’t agree more with the “howto” recommendation, but I the “create controversy” recommendation needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Sure, it will drive traffic (and comments), but I get turned off on people that are constantly trying to make a fuss.
About tracking adsense clicks, you’re right, Google doesn’t provide that data for some reason, but a while back I read about a way to track adsense clicks using Google Analytics. I haven’t tried it yet, but it sounds like it could work.
Here’s the link for details: http://www.seobook.com/archives/001370.shtml
There are also some commercial products that help track adsense clicks, but if this one does the trick, why bother with the paid ones. (I haven’t personally tried any of the paid ones, either).
Does this “How To” post work? http://eliteeternity.com/2008/01/07/how-to-make-people-laugh/
I thought it was relevant.