My soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods;
with singing lips my mouth will praise you.
– Psalm 63:5 (niv)

Making a warrior out of a boy

Becoming men

The ladies get a turn too

• Just because a blog post brings traffic to your site doesn’t make it good.
• Analytics allowed me to see it happening otherwise I might never have known until it was too late.
• You need to take decisive action when an article on your site is a potential killer but you should not:
  1. Delete it
  2. Rewrite it
  3. Panic about it

So what did I do? I made another post and put a link to that page.

What?

Yup, that’s it. I turned the killer blog post from veritable trojan horse into a squeeze page to move my readers into more friendly territory. Some people think of a squeeze page as a place to collect information from your readers. Emails and names being the most common. I look at it as a way of getting a reader to do what you want. Instead of squeezing information out of them I try to squeeze them through a funnel and in the proper direction. That is, deeper into my site.

I won’t get into the method behind the madness of how I chose where to put the link, or why that link, or any of that other stuff. It’s besides the point. If someone wants to know the gory details let me know and in the future I’ll write about it. This is what I will tell you about the link:

• The link belonged
  I knew throwing a link in there wasn’t going to accomplish anything. I needed to make it part of the landscape. It had to belong. That means my copy had to be creative and convince people to click it without it sticking out like a sore thumb.
• The link led to better things
  I move the reader into the most powerful content I have on that site. Because the killer blog post was a fluke as far as positioning in the search engines what they come looking for isn’t what the blog is about. That just means when they see what the blog is about it has to be good. Better than good, it has to be outstanding or I would lose them. Immediately.
• The link was inescapable
  If they wanted to finish the story, learn how to do what they came looking to do they had to click the link. To confirm for myself it was working I setup manual tracking on that one link. At this point 85% of the people who visit that page, click that link. Not 100% but not too bad either

I’m curious, have you ever made a blog post and had something similar happen? You found a nice jump in traffic for keywords that you not only didn’t intentionally target, but were counter productive to the message you were wanting to convey? If so what did you do about it?

A few months ago I wrote a killer blog post on another blog I have. It climbed rapidly to the top of the SERPs for Google, Bing, and Yahoo. OK, not the very top but within the top 5. In all honesty I hope that NEVER happens again. Right about now you probably have on your WTF face. But hear me out. See the trouble with the killer post running to the top of the SERPs is that it’s not for my targeted keywords. Don’t get me wrong I’m still doing well on those words as well (top 5) but now nearly half (47 to 48 percent depending on the day) of my traffic comes to my blog expecting one thing and getting another. Granted the one article, the killer, speaks to their needs, but it’s not what my blog is about.

How did I fix the problem? By embracing it. How in the world did I do that? Glad you asked!

• I did NOT kill the killer blog post:
  Initially when I saw the effect of the post I was going to delete it. I figured if I removed it then I couldn’t rank for it. But after considering that option I decided to leave it right where it was. Being completely honest it was more that I didn’t want to send an article I had spent so much time on to an early grave than me having any notion I could work it to my advantage. Regardless it stayed and people kept flocking to it.
• I did NOT rewrite the killer blog post:
  The thought of reworking the article so it was just a little worse than others of its kind crossed my mind. Remove a few words here, change some of the structure around, change the title, all that good stuff. I figured I could sabotage my own work, the article would still be there, and I’d go on with my life. But in the end I didn’t change it. And the masses kept coming.
• I did NOT panic about the killer blog post:
  When I accepted the fact that the post wasn’t going anywhere and wasn’t going to be changed I saw no need to panic about it. Instead I sat down and plotted out how to make another killer blog post that fed off of the first one.

That’s enough of what I didn’t do, now I’ll show you what I did do with that killer post.