newmediaMike

Instant LinkBait - declare something dead

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If you want traffic spikes run a “Something is dead or dying” post. Like vultures to carrion people will immediately flock to a blog posting declaring something dead.

I came across two posts like this today. One was from Mark Evans who declared “The Death of System Access Fees?” (and had his account suspended by his host for the immediate spike in traffic BTW).

Mark learned the hard way the truth about writing an RIP post. Hell I’ve written many myself and they are always the ones responsible for upticks in my page views. They are definitely effective at generating traffic spikes, but unless you want to become an obituary blog should be used sparingly.

The other post was from a pundit declaring yet again that SEO was dead. Well maybe not quite dead but if you practice SEO you have 3 years tops left in the market.

” … the act of SEO - adjusting the code and content of a website with the primary purpose to be ranked highly in search results, is on its way out.”

Declaring SEO to be dead seems to be a really hot linkbait meme these days. The thing about this guys post is he can’t even back up any of his claims. Which is definitely a sign of link bait. He has some laughable moments in the post and the comments, but it’s still just link bait.

He also says Pay per Click will be an effective medium for marketing for a long time. I definitely have to disagree with him on this point. I’m running a PPC campaign on Facebook right now for my Christmas VHS to DVD business. As of this writing I’ve had 106,000 impressions which have resulted in 34 click throughs (a 3% CTR) to the Facebook page I set up and this has resulted in ZERO click throughs to my business website and ZERO phone calls.  My organic search work has driven 225 page views in the same time frame and resulted in 4 phone calls ( a dismal 1.7% CTR) but has resulted in 4 jobs - (100% conversion, not bad if I do say so myself).

My cost for my organic search results? ZERO, and put over $300 in my pocket.

Cost for my PPC to date $15.00 and ZERO revenue.

So IMHO, I don’t see PPC being as effective as organic.