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This is a guest post by Ethan Christ who blogs over at Poetry 2.0. Ethan is currently running an After Christmas Contest Giveaway with a $50 adsense voucher prize.

Without traffic, your website is just taking up space. If zero people read what you post, then why even bother posting it? Today I am not going to talk about various ways to promote your blog, but rather I am going to tell you what sparks a reader’s interests and keeps a surge of traffic coming to my blog. The answer is simple: Controversy.

If I were to give you two articles to read; one article being about how to tune a guitar, the other a very opinionated negative review of Hostgator and their abuse, which would you prefer to read or react to?

The first article of mine has had around 300 pageviews in the 3 months that it has been posted. The opinionated one was posted at the end of November and currently has had over 8000 pageviews. So is it worth it to write something that people aren’t necessarily all going to agree with? In my experience, it is worth well around 7,700 pageviews more!

Now note that while ‘Abuse Hostgator’ has had 8,000+ pageviews, that doesn’t necessarily mean that if you write a review of a popular company, you’re going to get that much traffic. Nothing in the online world is concrete, and things are always changing. One thing remains, people love controversy. How many times have you stumbled through the blogosphere to find a post that you completely disagreed with, and you told others about it as well? Now just imagine, based on the aforementioned question, what do you think would happen if you wrote an article others disagreed with.

Controversy in the blogosphere can become viral real quick if the content is good enough. Not every controversial article you write will get the same results, you have to pick and choose on what you think people will want to read about. Even though your article may seem as if others will disagree with it doesn’t mean they won’t read it.

So Do You Want Traffic?

• Write a controversial post.
• Type up your rough draft.
• Proof read it! (Don’t be like John Chow and use incorrect grammar)
• Publish your post.
• Submit to social networking sites (Stumbleupon, Mixx, etc…)
• Watch your analytics reports for the next few days

Once you get your article posted, you’re going to need to let people know about it. If you’ve already got a pretty popular blog/website, you probably don’t need to do this as some of your readers will probably do it before you get a chance. If you aren’t so lucky to have a steady stream of traffic that reads every post, you need to get some. Submit your post anywhere you can without seeming like a spammer. Write a guest post and cleverly insert a link to your post, but make sure the link is relevant to your post or else that just makes you a dirty spammer. If you think your article is good enough, email some of the bigger blogs and see if they’ll link to your post. Basically, promote that post just as you would your homepage.

This post isn’t telling you to go out and start writing negative reviews just for the hell of. It’s not telling to you lie. This post is meant to inform you of what attracts readers. It’s never a good idea to just post a bunch of lies, that destroys your credibility, but if you have a true story about a negative experience with a popular company or even a popular blogger, post it. You never know what the response is going to be.

So what brings more traffic? A bland article, or a hot story on how some big company screwed you over?!

If you would like to submit your own guest post to be featured on Mixed Market Arts, please visit the guest post page.