Brian Lam, chief blogger at Gizmodo wrote an interesting comment at Valleywag about how traffic baiting and other low quality posts purely designed to increase page views without providing real value to readers will backfire in the long term.
The comment was in response to the news that Gizmodo are paying writers using a mixture of performance related pay and a monthly retainer.
Easy hits cause CPM deflation over time, making your real news posts, the core posts, worth less and less. It also rewards laziness, which I know have to slap down with an iron fist. So the funny random viral videos we loved posting so much before have become a serious problem with making sure pay is fair across the site. It forces you to be very careful, actually.
So, if you have a solid business model and are writing content that people actually want to read about maybe you should consider holding back on linkbait and Digg bait style posts. Or at least try to make them so good that your regular readers will love them too.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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I have found a nice compromise where you write real top-notch posts and then just have a Digg-friendly headline.
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