Monday, June 30, 2008

Do not read this blog post

So you're reading this post, huh? Kind of a compelling title, isn’t it?

Why is that?

Read_this_post

I have strong evidence that "negative" Web headlines and links often generate lots more clicks than "positive" ones. For example, my Worst Practices blog category gets more clicks than any other category on this blog.

Several years ago I worked on a site where we included a link "For Executives Only" and this generated more traffic than other links. It turns out people react to negatives. Words like "Worst", "Not", "Don't", and "Only" are interesting and people want to know what’s there.

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