How to Drive Traffic to my Blog: Productive Emotions

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2024-04-30 01:30:04

In the olden days of the Internet, I used to blog and then watch for my stats. I’d be happy if I had at least 1 comment and 300-400 views on the article I wrote. I didn’t understand why some posts create a big splash on the web with discussions lasting years while others, more often than not, didn’t provoke any response at all.

My colleague Filippo wrote a post with his observations on the subject, focusing on marketing acquisition channels. Pick these and these terms and you’ll appear in Google Search (that’s SEO), pay Facebook for an extra reach (that’s SEM), and you’ll succeed. I absolutely agree with this approach but I feel I have something to add.

You can drive as much traffic as you can but if the content is no good your expensive visitors will switch their attention to something else immediately and leave no trace of their presence other than a number in your Analytics. So while the acquisition is important, content is critical. There will be no chicken without an egg.

Certain things make people click and want to say what they can, share your stuff on Facebook, return to see updates, new comments, and responses to their opinion. We kind of want that as bloggers. But what are those things? Ryan Holiday in his book Trust me, I’m lying gives an answer that’s provocative an worth sharing. What engages people, according to him, is productive emotions. Fear. Outrage. Greed. Guilt. No emotion in the text means no social sharing, a dead post. Depressive emotions have the same effect – people wouldn’t share depressive thoughts. So the content that engages needs to be emotionally charged and productive.