Gone Fishin'

Several co-workers and I were discussing the latest famous deaths in the news recently at lunch today. At first it started out with our amazement that the rule of three had been broken (Ed, Farrah, then Michael, and then, out of the blue, Billy). Then we regressed to the discussions about Michael and some of the bad jokes we'd heard, including ones that he hadn't really died.

I know that Micheal has a very loyal following around the world (and that there are more than a few conspiracy theorists out there as well). I decided to test this notion with a post that simply stated "Michael Jackson is not dead" as the title. I did this right after lunch then we sat back to see who would take the bait.

Less than two hours later, someone from Singapore no less, arrived at my blog via a search for "Michael Jackson Not Dead" on Google's Blog search. We all thought it was rather funny; not all of us have perfect senses of humor.

I just checked my stats and in less than 10 hours from the time I posted it, that one post has drawn another 10 posts. I just modified it to include that fact that Miley and Britney are still OK, thank goodness, but I'm curious to see if that draws any more traffic.

Why am I doing this? Outside of the general perversion, it's an interesting statement about how to add traffic to your site -- though perhaps not the most ethical. One could simply scan through Google Trends site , or countless others, and write a quick snippet (or just a title as in my case) and you'd see traffic soar (a four-fold increase so far for my blog today from normal traffic patterns!). Add in a pay-per-impression advertising plan (instead of the AdSense pay-per-click I have here), and you could make a bit of money.

Just something to divert our minds from a slow day at the office I guess...