You’re Not Going to Believe the Trick I Learned While Trying to Increase My Site Traffic
Increasing your site traffic is the most important thing you should do if you are serious about making money from your website. With this in mind, I tripped across two of the most excellent tips about attracting traffic to your website.
The first significant tip came from a great article in the New York Times Magazine written by Virginia Heffernan. A Sucker is Optimized Every Second talks about how we shouldn’t be trusting our guts anymore. We should be trying in Big Data. In this excellent article, the following paragraph appeared, which changed my traffic-shaping world after I read it.
Traffic Increase Tip
On the web, “optimizing” has become a fine art — and, if not a dark art, at least a dim one that has become dimmer (and finer) since Siroker did it for Obama in 2007. For years, search-engine optimization, or S.E.O., has turned web pages into Googlebait.
These days, optimizers of squeeze pages, drawing lessons as much from the labcoats at Optimizely as from the big daddies at Google, recommend creating a three-to-10 minute video that’s introduced by a “magnetic headline” (“Find the Perfect Lampshade for Any Lamp”) and quickly chase it with an “information gap” like “You’re Not Going to Believe the Trick I Use While Lampshade Shopping.”
(Article of faith among optimizers: humans find information gaps intolerable and will move heaven and earth to close them.) Next you get specific: “Click the play button to see me do my lampshade trick!” — after which the video unspools, only to stall at the midpoint with a virtual tollbooth. You can’t go on unless you hand over an email address. Presto.
New Tork Times Virginia Heffernan
Is that not the most outstanding piece of information that is perfect for increasing the traffic to your site?
After writing this post, I feel that it is an example of the type of SEO-whoring you need to do to get your posts noticed and thus attract more folks who want to click on your AdSense ads or build traffic for your advertisers. This is an experiment to see whether I can increase traffic to this site by creating this horrendously over-optimized post. We shall see.