Beware of the Spike
Posted on January 28, 2008
Every once in a while, you will write an article that is of much interest to the masses, maybe because it’s a button-pusher, or because it’s a current trend.
We call these type of articles Spike Articles, because they generate traffic to your site (they “spike” traffic) just by the sheer nature of the article.
I recently came across a blogger who used this tactic quite frequently. Her blog was full of hate and anger, and she caused a stir of hurt feelings from others in her niche by posting a hurtful blog post. What happened is that several people, myself included, went over to her blog and posted our opinions of her article.
This post generated some circulation for her newly created blog; people came to her site just to read this one particular post. But when they got there, they realized that her site was nothing more than the rantings of an immature, childish person. Most people left her blog with a bad taste in their mouths, never to return again, and that was amplified by the fact that she literally told you to get lost. She pushed out the door to her blog!
What this posting did was “spike” traffic for her, but even though she got a little boost, her blog will now dip down, because she missed the #1 rule of the blogging world: Content is King.
That’s why I have a DIFFERENT approach to blogging. I use what I call the Elevated Traffic Model. This means that if you stick around my site long enough, you will garner all the information that I have to offer. I like to provide useful, timeless information, that will appeal to readers for many years to come, and hopefully after you do that, you’ll want to stick around for next week’s episode.
Let’s take my site, Korean Diary. On there, I have a Word of the Day podcast, and attached to each podcast is a nice grammar lesson. Well, I don’t think the Korean language is going to go extinct anytime soon, so that information will ALWAYS be useful. Anyone who lands on my site, who is interesting in learning the Korean language, will WANT to explore it further. The site, as it was broken out, encourages people to stay and explore, and sign up for my podcast.
This is not to say that I don’t have information that could quickly become outdated. I occasionally do articles that have a specified time limit, say, a holiday recipe, or reporting about a local event. So I do have the occasional Spike Article. But then I invite readers, once they land on my site from a Spike Article, to stay here.
So avoid the temptation to create flaming articles that will gather people’s attention for a short period of time, because when they leave your site, they probably won’t return.
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[…] few week ago I preached about the importance of avoiding “spike” traffic, or traffic that’s generated from a controversial blog article. Some articles by their nature […]