Formula For Controversy
One classic method to get blog traffic - controversy.
How do you do that? Well, you can talk about things, places or people you dislike. One simple way would be to point out the flaws of a certain something that comes to your mind. Last year Mike Abundo got into a little controversy over the name Pinoy Cosplay. He had a website with a domain name related to Pinoy Cosplay. Apparently, there was already a mailing list with the Pinoy Cosplay tag. Noelle De Guzman claims to have coined the term for the mailing list she created. There was a bit of online arguments that were posted on the matter.
Whatever happened to it, I'm pretty sure Mike Abundo's blog gained some significant traffic over the controversy.
The latest controversy that seems to be going around the Pinoy blogosphere is the recent Top Ten Emerging Influential Blogs of 2007. Just read Manuel Viloria's post on the matter to get a gist of it.
Seems like any type of contest or award-giving event is prone to controversy. Shari gave her thoughts on the awarding event itself. I recall some controversies in the last Philippine blog awards as well as some questions on the validity of the latest Philippine SEO contest. I know of a notable someone who asked me - why use "Paradise Philippines" for the SEO contest keywords when somebody already owns that paradisephilippines.com domain and would naturally have an advantage?
From these cases, I can now see a formula to become controversial.
1. Start an awarding event or contest.
2. Put a lot of marketing effort into the awarding event.
3. Get some judges for the marketing event and have them decide on it.
4. Invite a lot of critical people to the event (those who will notice and blog about the little details).
Pretty soon you will get something controversial out of it.
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August 16th, 2007 - 14:20
I don’t actively seek controversy. It just follows me around a lot. :P
August 17th, 2007 - 03:37
That’s fairly easy to do, I think. A perfect linkbait pa. Hits + clicks = happy bloggers. That’s why it’s sometimes cool to “voice out” your own opinion regarding controversies eh. You get linked to a lot when they find your thoughts parallel to theirs. LOL.
August 17th, 2007 - 15:35
There’s a goodly-sized community of people who can back up that the mailing list had already previously existed and was linked to from Anime Web Turnpike (a good source for anime links, which Mr. Abundo should have checked before nicking our name). But yes, it seems to be his common policy to be controversial. If you can’t be famous, be infamous, right?
We were very good about not linking to his websites, however.