• Just because a blog post brings traffic to your site doesn’t make it good.
• Analytics allowed me to see it happening otherwise I might never have known until it was too late.
• You need to take decisive action when an article on your site is a potential killer but you should not:
  1. Delete it
  2. Rewrite it
  3. Panic about it

So what did I do? I made another post and put a link to that page.

What?

Yup, that’s it. I turned the killer blog post from veritable trojan horse into a squeeze page to move my readers into more friendly territory. Some people think of a squeeze page as a place to collect information from your readers. Emails and names being the most common. I look at it as a way of getting a reader to do what you want. Instead of squeezing information out of them I try to squeeze them through a funnel and in the proper direction. That is, deeper into my site.

I won’t get into the method behind the madness of how I chose where to put the link, or why that link, or any of that other stuff. It’s besides the point. If someone wants to know the gory details let me know and in the future I’ll write about it. This is what I will tell you about the link:

• The link belonged
  I knew throwing a link in there wasn’t going to accomplish anything. I needed to make it part of the landscape. It had to belong. That means my copy had to be creative and convince people to click it without it sticking out like a sore thumb.
• The link led to better things
  I move the reader into the most powerful content I have on that site. Because the killer blog post was a fluke as far as positioning in the search engines what they come looking for isn’t what the blog is about. That just means when they see what the blog is about it has to be good. Better than good, it has to be outstanding or I would lose them. Immediately.
• The link was inescapable
  If they wanted to finish the story, learn how to do what they came looking to do they had to click the link. To confirm for myself it was working I setup manual tracking on that one link. At this point 85% of the people who visit that page, click that link. Not 100% but not too bad either

I’m curious, have you ever made a blog post and had something similar happen? You found a nice jump in traffic for keywords that you not only didn’t intentionally target, but were counter productive to the message you were wanting to convey? If so what did you do about it?

A few months ago I wrote a killer blog post on another blog I have. It climbed rapidly to the top of the SERPs for Google, Bing, and Yahoo. OK, not the very top but within the top 5. In all honesty I hope that NEVER happens again. Right about now you probably have on your WTF face. But hear me out. See the trouble with the killer post running to the top of the SERPs is that it’s not for my targeted keywords. Don’t get me wrong I’m still doing well on those words as well (top 5) but now nearly half (47 to 48 percent depending on the day) of my traffic comes to my blog expecting one thing and getting another. Granted the one article, the killer, speaks to their needs, but it’s not what my blog is about.

How did I fix the problem? By embracing it. How in the world did I do that? Glad you asked!

• I did NOT kill the killer blog post:
  Initially when I saw the effect of the post I was going to delete it. I figured if I removed it then I couldn’t rank for it. But after considering that option I decided to leave it right where it was. Being completely honest it was more that I didn’t want to send an article I had spent so much time on to an early grave than me having any notion I could work it to my advantage. Regardless it stayed and people kept flocking to it.
• I did NOT rewrite the killer blog post:
  The thought of reworking the article so it was just a little worse than others of its kind crossed my mind. Remove a few words here, change some of the structure around, change the title, all that good stuff. I figured I could sabotage my own work, the article would still be there, and I’d go on with my life. But in the end I didn’t change it. And the masses kept coming.
• I did NOT panic about the killer blog post:
  When I accepted the fact that the post wasn’t going anywhere and wasn’t going to be changed I saw no need to panic about it. Instead I sat down and plotted out how to make another killer blog post that fed off of the first one.

That’s enough of what I didn’t do, now I’ll show you what I did do with that killer post.

Complete lack of original content

Talk about beating a dead horse. These clowns keep writing about the same pathetic garbage day after day after day. And we eat it up like it’s the finest cut of steak in the house. Not only do we read, with baited breath their every boring and droll word we then spend 10 or 15 minutes crafting a comment hoping against hope that they’ll actually spend 3 seconds replying to us or in some other way making reference to what we talked about.

Tell me, how many times can we read a series on Building a better blog or how about one on The importance of getting readers to comment? But these A-Listers keep throwing it out there like candy and we eat it up. Fact is that it’s not candy, it’s feces and they’re a bunch of monkeys throwing it at us and we’re chowing down on their shit. Prime example: Twitter. I like twitter as much as the next guy but how many times do I have read about the latest and greatest “feature” which in reality is just someone copying another idea?

These people actually believe their own press

They read the comments people leave for them that go something like this:

Hey Blogger Dude(tte) just wanted to tell you how great your blog is and how much I learned from you. You’re so awesome and I want to bear your children!!!!

Yes I know in reality it’s much worse than that, but since this is a somewhat family friendly piece of internet real estate I decided not to be overly graphic. Point is they read these comments and they actually start believing they’ve added value to the internet and worse yet to people’s lives in general.

Funny thing is I could have given about 150 more reasons that A-List bloggers suck but I got to depressed thinking about it to go on.

How am I going to benefit from your content?

We have a finite time in our days no matter who we are or what we do. Because of this we expect to benefit for our time and effort of looking at your content. It could be learning something new, being entertained, reexamining our position on and issue, or something else entirely. But the common denominator is that there needs to be something in it for me.

Why should I choose your content over the competition?

If you were to hand 10 people a one page “fact sheet” and then ask them to write a blog post on the contents of the fact sheet you’d get 10 very widely differing articles. Even with that fact there’s going to be one, or two that really stand out. That you just read and understand. A couple of the posts are going to resonate with you. The same is true with blogs. There are a lot of blogs out there that give the same information, but a few stand out head and shoulders above the rest.

Did you make an effort?

Anyone can go out concoct a blog post out of existing information. A dab of this, a pinch of that. Copy and paste, edit some words, move sentences around. But did you really take the time to understand what you are passing along to me? Because if you don’t how can you expect me to get any thing from your post? You don’t need to be the premier expert at what you write about, but you need to be educated.

Today I was watching a video from Westboro Baptist “church” (and in this instance I only grudgingly use the word church) on YouTube. Fred Phelps was up to his usual nonsense and of course there were no shortage of comments decrying them (Westboro Baptist). It dawned on me as I was watching, listening, and reading the comments at how absolutely brilliant Westboro Baptist is. From a marketing standpoint. Until a few years ago who had ever heard of Fred Phelps and Westboro baptists church? Now it is a household name. Synomous with hate, and bigotry of course but household nonetheless. It got me thinking about a few things.

Can negative press be beneficial to a blog?

Some will say that any press is beneficial for a blog, but I disagree. The right press at the right time is beneficial for a blog. And sometimes the “right press” is negative. For some reason our human psyche is captivated by ugly things. That’s why people will slow down to a crawl as they drive past a car crash. Anyone who tells you they slowed down for the safety of the emergency works is lying. We want to see the carnage. Be that twisted steel or twisted bodies.

It’s the same with a blog. When someone highlights a blog in a negative light it draws traffic to that blog. People want to see the disaster for themselves. Kind of like when people view a Westboro Baptist YouTube video. They already know it’s going to be bad, everyone has told them this but they still go to watch it.

Can you capitalize on negative press?

I believe that you can, but it takes some forethought and preparation. There need to be two things in place; a plan of action and the ability to recognize when to implement that plan.

1. Have a plan in place BEFORE the negative press hits
2. Recognize when it does hit and not after the fact

It’s easy to reflect and know when something turned negative but the real skill is to see it when it happens and immediately begin to work it to your advantage. If you try to jump on it a few days after the initial storm has died down you will end up looking like someone who is trying to justify themselves rather than someone who is meeting the challenge head-on.

Should you generate your own negative press?

In some instances yes, in some no. Let me explain. You need to gauge the answer on your own abilities to make a connection with your visitors. First consider your current readers.

• How will they react?
• Will you alienate them?
• Will they see it as a brilliant ploy or will they be offended

Next consider those you will be entrapping with the negative press “ploy”

• Is your target audience going to take the bait?
• If they do respond can you keep them interested?
• Can you depend on them to generate secondary interest with their contacts?

Finally consider your own moral values in regards to generating your own negative press. Because at the end of the day you need to live with yourself and how you’ve handled it.

Now some questions for you:

1. Have you ever dealt with negative press?
2. Did you create it, or was it “natural”?
3. What was the end effect? Good, bad, or no change?