This wasn’t the piece I had planned for today, but after reading a post in a writing forum, I started thinking…
Is all traffic good traffic? I read something today that had me thinking. It was suggested that having negative attention directed towards a revenue-driven blog isn’t necessarily a bad thing, after all, any publicity is good publicity, right?
I thought I might explore this. As the victim of some negative attention last week, did the thousands of extra visitors help my blog and raise my revenue? No, it did not. The blog that took the biggest hit doesn’t have ads, so all that did was turn off members of our new community. We lost some visitors and subscribers.
Did the negative attention help FWJ? I’m sorry to say it didn’t. I lost a few readers and the negative attention didn’t increase my revenue last week at all, if anything it was lower than usual. So while I did get a large increase in traffic, it didn’t benefit at all. In fact, November was my worst month in some time, revenue-wise. I have no way of speaking for the blogs I don’t own as I don’t have access to the revenue for them.
Here’s something interesting. I received a HUGE surge in traffic thanks to Stumble Upon, about 10,000 new visitors last week. My revenue did go up a little as a result of this traffic.
So here’s my not so scientific conclusion. Does negative attention and publicity help drive up revenue? Not on my blogs. Would I encourage or recmmend this kind of attention in order to drive up traffic and revenue? No because:
- A. It makes my community uncomfortable.
- B. It makes me uncomfortable
- C. It’s damaging to my reputation as a problogger and freelance writer.
- My mom and sisters have been known to visit from time to time.
Controversy and drama may make good linkbait, but it’s not my thing. Here’s to a nice, positive FWJ in 2008.
Back to your regularly scheduled program…
December 3rd, 2007 at 11:05 pm
Kudos for rising above it all, Deb. And I’d have to agree, I’d rather have no traffic than all the negativity. Sorry you lost some readers, though…hopefully, they’ll be back.
December 3rd, 2007 at 11:11 pm
I’m sorry too, Deb. I must have missed something, because I didn’t notice any drama.
Anyway, your core community will certainly remain loyal and that’s the good traffic, right?
December 3rd, 2007 at 11:16 pm
Though you could be accurate in your assessment, you may want to consider that traffic may have declined due to Thanksgiving holiday or discussion topics. Letter clinics seemed to get a lot more responses as do discussions discussing “value” of this line of work (we all get very defensive when someone from “the outside” ‘disses’ us).
December 3rd, 2007 at 11:20 pm
Depends on the site. If you’re running a celeb blog where everyone’s mean and evil anyway, trust me, unpleasantness helps you.
December 3rd, 2007 at 11:23 pm
I can’t believe you actually lost readers because of a post. Personally, I thought the post was lighthearted and humorous, and I really don’t understand why people took it so seriously. It’s not like you were discussing a controversy, political view, or religion.
December 3rd, 2007 at 11:29 pm
Thanks for your kind words, guys.
@Phil - I didn’t lose traffic. I had a huge increase in traffic but it was due to a negative situation and didn’t help my blog any. Though in all fairness, my traffic and revenue tanked once I switched to my own domain and I’ve been pretty much running this blog out of my own pocket since the end of October.
Valencia - Actually I didn’t lose my readers because of a post, I lost readers thanks to vulgar and abusive comments as a result of that post. At first I deleted the comments but received a lot of flack, so I left it up. Then I received flack for letting the drama continue through the comments. I’m damned if I do, damned if I don’t. But there will be no more of that here.
December 3rd, 2007 at 11:31 pm
I can’t say that I would be bothered to lose some readers, if they left because of one instance of negativity. Most of the stuff that went on was due to ill mannered people who felt the need to be cool in the eyes of the internet equivalent of the jock squad. Those are the types of readers who just don’t ‘get it’ and are not loyal.
If you respect someone and their writing, you will disagree, maybe make a comment on it, then continue on to what you do like.
The other blog is a place for you to let your hair down a little. It’s the same as people always assuming a teacher must be prim and proper outside of school, that a police officer is always on duty, and that a mother has no right to ever be anything but a mom.
You didn’t get out of line, curse anyone out, give insults towards appearance, or anything else that could affect you professional or show that you are any less qualified to give advice.
December 3rd, 2007 at 11:45 pm
I don’t feel you did anything worthy of losing readers. But the world’s a funny place. I once had a dozen authors blacklist my website because I’d pointed out a serious error in the timeline of an an author’s story. She felt that it was rude to mention she’d made a mistake, my own thought was that a novel that has been edited and then published as a historical should be at least partially accurate or have a note stating the author is taking serious liberties with history. In the end, I don’t miss the authors who blacklisted me.
Word of mouth can affect things though and I was just thinking of something unrelated but along the lines of word of mouth. I was just chatting with my brother to find out if he’s feeling better - he had the stomach flu over the weekend. Anyway, he suddenly vanished mid-sentence. Came back fifteen minutes later to explain. He’d been talking and heard a wicked pop come from his living room. Went in and found his universal remote lying on the floor, the battery cover off, and one of the Duracell batteries he’d just put into it had exploded and there was battery acid leaking out. I find that scary, imagine if it had been a kid’s toy!
After quick search of the keywords duracell exploding, I come across an article in a British version of PC World - http://www.pcw.co.uk/personal-computer-world/analysis/2196695/strange-case-exploding-aaa-cell
Then I found two more about people whose Duracell’s had exploded. I can guarantee that I won’t be buying Duracells again based on these experiences, and I’m about to get off my computer and go see if I have any Duracells on hand that need to be disposed of. Four exploding batteries is definitely going to be the end of my ever using Duracell, and my little brother’s about to head to The Consumerist to share his story and pictures.
While this has nothing to do with Deb’s experiences, it does go to show that personal thoughts/experiences can destroy a company’s reputation.
December 3rd, 2007 at 11:56 pm
You are and always will be (at least as long as you can stand some of the idiots)the go-to site for freelance writers who want to know the skinny. You have gained a loyal reader here.
December 4th, 2007 at 12:47 am
I don’t think that creating negative traffic helps any blog or website. Positive traffic is what you look for with intelligent conversation to help people learn and find out important information such as this topic.
Sure there are blogs that thrive on negative and hatful comments and traffic, but that is their choice of a blog. The blogs in your post and at other forums are to be informational and drive people there to learn and have a pleasant chat.
I have to agree that negative traffic generation is hurtful to your loyal followers, who expect respect and tame converstion.
Just my two cents.
December 4th, 2007 at 1:18 am
I’m glad I missed whatever unpleasantness was swirling, but I’m sorry you fell victim to it. This post shows what a pro you are - what a way to make lemonade from lemons!
December 4th, 2007 at 1:27 am
@Crabbie, while true the celeb stuff does begat some vulgar and trashy comments. I’m trying to discourage this on my own celeb blogs and every now and then have to do a major clean out of the comments.
Again, I don’t mind disagreeing, but I’d like to keep it clean. For instance if you want to visit Celebrity Cowboy and talk about whether or not it’s more attractive to age gracefully over getting plastic surgery I’d welcome that discussion. If you’re just going to call Paris Hilton vulgar names, I’m probably going to delete you.
I think you can have a popular celeb blog and be a bit snarky without going over board. That’s what I’m trying to do anyway.
December 4th, 2007 at 2:48 am
I have found stumble traffic to be a complete waste of time financially. I think google paid about 10 cents per thousand visitors to this post. And I have no idea my true clickthroughs after having the server crashed several times.
http://internationalpropertyinvestment.com/the-worlds-most-unusual-properties-for-saleI
I missed the controversy thing I’m afraid
December 4th, 2007 at 3:45 am
I believe that the downside to all of this is only starting to sink in. I’ve been a google advertiser in the past, and I was not at all happy with the results. Given that a recession, or something close to one, is coming, I don’t see anyone paying more than a penny an eyeball in the near future for anything.
There will be a big crimp in the revenue, and if the bashers and idiots take over a site I can imagine the readership will die off. Tight margins plus a real chance of major failure makes this biz something more like retail sales than I’d be comfortable with.
Still, the main reason any of us try this stuff (I had my first blog in 1999, before the word “blog” existed) is to have some kind of independent outlet for writing. While I’m not too sure about the security of the current state, we have to keep looking for something that works. It pains me to see how horribly under-valued good writing is, and the only way to change that is to have a viable outlet that we can control ourselves.
December 4th, 2007 at 3:54 am
I’ve had exactly the opposite experience, Deb. Like Mark, I found StumbleUpon (and Digg and Twitter and others) a complete and utter waste of time. On the other hand, most of my “negative” traffic has come from forums/blogs/sites where the original poster/writer/commenter came off sounding so hysterical that I’m sure most people came to MY site just to see if I was really the fruit-loop the poster described. In my case “negative” traffic has been a very, very profitable thing. I don’t court it, I certainly don’t feed it but I’ve learned to live with it.
December 4th, 2007 at 5:56 am
Hi there. I find that social networking sites drive tons of traffic, but for some reason these users almost never click on any ads.
I still love traffic though. Here is a great article with 50 Tips to by Top Diggers on Getting to the Front Page of Digg - http://www.socialnetworkingarticles.com/2007/11/30/how-to-submit-popular-digg-stories-that-get-to-the-front-page-tips-by-top-digg-users/
… I thought your users would find it useful.
Thank you again for the great article.
Rachel
December 4th, 2007 at 7:57 am
I agree that not all traffic would be good. It seems to me that people who are surfing the web for information (or products/services in some cases) would be the ones to click on ads, not people who are following you over from some social network site to read a specific article, and certainly not a bunch of people whose only goals are to be childish and nasty.
December 4th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
Stumble Upon has been very good to me and I’ve had a couple of blog posts (for other blogs) make it to Digg’s front page. I think I prefer the staying power of Stumble Upon over the one or two day surge created by Dogg.
December 4th, 2007 at 10:13 pm
I agree Deb that negativity ultimately is not a good thing. Yes, you received increased traffic, but at what expense. I personally feel the more negative people are the more negative their life will be/become.
You handle yourself with the utmost professionalism and I have never seen you speak out on something that wasn’t warranted or true. I follow you (no not stalking…lol) in another forum and have never seen anything written by you to be rude or negative.
This is just another one of those times you can chalk it up to a learning experience. Have a great day!
I must have missed something though…lol…cause I never saw anything either.
December 6th, 2007 at 12:09 pm
Well, as both a freelance writer and a PR professional, I’d completely agree that all publicity is definitely not good publicity. If it costs you more in reputation or time, money, or energy to clean a mess up than you got out of it, there’s no arguing with the numbers. Rep is the big factor though.
I’m extremely controversial on some blogs, and my readers there tend to love it. On others I’m extremely tame and even “blah” in comparison, because it’s a different market. You have to cater to your readers both with your content strategy and any publicity you can manage to control. The positive side though is that a problem can always be turned into an opportunity to shine if you handle it well.