The Clickbait Experiment (You Should Probably Read This)
Alice Scarlet Death
After my April Fool’s prank, I noticed my click bait title “You’ll Never Believe What’s In Store For This Wild Blog” had an insane amount of organic views, especially on Facebook. So I’m going to try an experiment, and I hope it doesn’t annoy anyone too terribly much, but sometimes there are experiments that just have to be done.
I’m going to write as many clickbait articles as I can before this article publishes (I wrote this two weeks ago, but it’s publishing today as you can see.) Rather, after this article goes live you will see a deluge of clickbait titles come through the works. I don’t know whether I want to trickle them out during the day for a few days or just have a one every hour for a full day.
I’ve actually done something similar to this before, back when I had the Black Flower Music Podcast. Tony and I did a project called “Shark Week” where we recorded a 45 minute podcast once a day for five days. Then one year we did 5 regular podcasts and 5 music podcasts, resulting in 10 podcasts in one week period. We kind of wanted to break the internet. Some of the rules of good online PR is consistency and to stagger releases in an appealing way. When you are just a hobbyist it’s hard to have content every hour or more like the major sites do, but that’s how they stay popular. They release often, consistently, and use titles.
Also on the old blog, I had strange listicle articles like “Top 10 Hottest Anime Chicks” and just posted a bunch of weird stuff and also Hannah Montana was one of them. The article got picked up by the bots and blogs and it was responsible for my blog getting a consistent amount of hits. It was mostly from people who wanted to give me death threats for including Hannah Montana on a list of hot anime women.
Points of note: Even though these articles will have clickbait titles they will still have genuine content. They might not be very long, and some of it might be a stretch. If I really run out of ideas I might get desperate and go to a very strange place of absurdity that you’ll make sense out of but you won’t understand how you understand it.
I want to write some interesting stuff, but there are definitely going to be some bizarre listicles. (Top 10 Foods You Never Realized Were Actually Grimoires)
This is gonna be a fun trip. Please be excited.
