Cosmo Headlines: How I quadrupled blog traffic

As an experiment I responded to Brian Clark's challenge to write a compelling headline based on a Cosmopolitan magazine title. His post The Cosmo Headline Technique for Blogging Inspiration suggests that we can benefit from the sensationalism journalists use to create headlines that entice and titillate.

On December 4th I published "Shocking: 68% of Bloggers Do This in Bed!" over on my blog about Writing on the Web. Sure enough, traffic doubled for a couple of days.

Last week I noticed another spike, this time to an all-time high, four times the usual number of daily visits. I tracked where the visitors were coming from: Brian had published a follow-up post called Cosmopolitan Link Karma and linked to my post.

Lessons here:

1. Sex still sells.
2. Magazines and tabloids can teach us how to write!
3. Getting a link from Brian gets results.
4. Play in bigger sand boxes if you want more traffic.
5. Getting more traffic doesn't mean anything: it's new subscribers that really count.