You’ll Never Get More Readers Without Doing This

Hello, I’m James and this is my blog, ‘James Proclaims’. Every Wednesday, for the last few months, I have been writing disingenuous posts with click-bait titles. While my motivation has always been fairly tongue-in-cheek, I did start doing this partly to see if it made any difference to my overall stats.

I don’t massively care about stats – I did once, I presume most bloggers do when they start out, but over time most of us realise that while a general upward trend is probably a good thing, having lots of new followers doesn’t necessarily translate to having lots of people actually reading your blog. It’s not always even clear if ‘likes’ are indicative of people having read anything.

Nonetheless, my stats do fascinate me because I’m never quite sure what influences them. It’s certainly not my writing.

So as well as being a project to amuse myself with, the click-bait titles did serve as a kind of barometer with which to gauge my stats. What I learned, if I learned anything, was that when a click-bait title pertained to blogging it did really seem to have a measurable impact. Other titles fared less well, although some were more impactful than others.

This makes sense, the people most likely to come across my blog are inevitably going to be other bloggers and we all want to know how to be better bloggers don’t we? Even people who pretend not to care, like me, secretly crave the magic elixir, which will lead to blogging greatness.

Sadly that elixir still eludes me, and I started to bore myself with the click-bait titles a while back. I’m not entirely sure why I’ve kept going with them for so long.

So this is my last one.

If you clicked here looking the secret to getting new readers then I’m afraid it remains a secret to me too. Although an eye-catching title is probably a good thing. As long as you’re not peddling a lie.