Boost Your Blog -Start an Argument.

How can being wrong drive more people to your blog?

I read lots of blogs and articles that tell me how to drive up my blog hits and followers. Most talk about regular blogging, insightful and well structured posts, and slowly building a following that trusts your opinion. Needless to say, writing blogs about how to get more hits on your blog seems like a good way to achieve this –though I don’t expect a huge groundswell as a result of this little offering.

But something happened earlier this week that made me realise that there can be another way of rapidly upping blog hits. I posted on a relatively new blog I’d established at the end of last year, I'd written a short entry that was to be the first of several about the subject of the website it was linked to. It was simply intended to be a quick introduction, with more meaty and informative posts to follow. I was surprised then, at how quickly I got a number of comments, and how quickly the number of hits shot up. I assumed this was partly due to the fact that the first person to comment was well known and respected in the subject about which I was blogging. Another thing I noticed was that his comment strongly refuted the subject of my blog, and so did all the others. I knew I’d written something a little provocative, but I didn’t think I was so wrong that absolutely no-one was prepared to agree with me. Believing the argument was too one-sided I spent a couple of hours writing a good argument to defend my position. As a check I re-read my original blog and it was only then that I noticed I had made a mistake.
I had intended the piece to be a little provocative, to pique people’s interest, but when I re-read it, I realised that what I had actually written was an order of magnitude more provocative than what I had intended. This explained the comments. I felt a terrible embarrassment; how could I have published something so stupid in front of the very readers I was attempting to impress? Then it dawned on me; far from putting people off, it had drawn people in, and the hit count had risen far beyond my expectations.

So from an embarrassing mistake, my blog provoked discussion and interest. No news is bad news, as Hollywood agents are wont to say. It won’t work for everyone, and it shouldn’t be overused, but posting a blog entry that people disagree with can be a quick way to boost your exposure. So go on, start an argument; you might make new friends.

Tweets or Twits?

I learnt today that I am expected to start a twitter account to help promote my blogs. For some reason there has always been some instinct that kept me from going anywhere near twitter. To be honest I can't even be bothered to text on my mobile; it's quicker to make a call.

Don't get me wrong –I'm no technophobe, I've bought into technology; I had a mobile before any of my peers, I took office space in a media centre that gave me broadband back in 96, and I've been designing interactive content for CDs and Websites before most people had the kit to access CDs and websites. Perhaps it might be more accurate to call me a technocynic.

None the less I found myself approaching the whole twitter thing with a little reservation. I began by watching a youtube video by a woman extolling the virtues of twitter to promote her own blogs. Before the video was halfway through I found myself crying. These were not tears of joy, some rapture of realisation, no, these were tears wrenched from the core of my being, tears shed for the human race. What had we become? Beings capable profound understanding of the nature of the universe, philosophy, music, art, who can express the deepest emotion through prose and attain the highest states of self awareness through long meditation, reduced to twitter.

– Pellets of fecal minutiae passing mindlessly from one computer screen to another, pointlessly creating thousands of tonnes of carbon dioxide, hastening our own demise.

So of course I had to sign up...

UnforgivingMuse Twits.