Distractify.com and the art of eye catching titles

[cardine]

Well, I decided to take the plunge and enter into whatever you want to call this niche. Started work on this design 2 days ago, currently 9 posts in. I might change the domain if I happen to think of anything better/more catchy.

Viral Current - Popular Images and Stories From Around the Web

You are being too obvious with your titles and images. Since this is something that will rely on Facebook, and you want people browsing this on Facebook to click to your site, the main title and image should be used for piquing their interest as opposed to telling them the story.

Instead of "A Janitor Secretly Worked On This Mind-Boggling Maze For 7 Years Of His Life" it should be something like "You Won't Believe What this Janitor Has Been Doing for the Past 7 Years of His Life".

The first one gives away the story. The second one gets you interested in the story.

 

[mituozo]

You are being too obvious with your titles and images. Since this is something that will rely on Facebook, and you want people browsing this on Facebook to click to your site, the main title and image should be used for piquing their interest as opposed to telling them the story.

Instead of "A Janitor Secretly Worked On This Mind-Boggling Maze For 7 Years Of His Life" it should be something like "You Won't Believe What this Janitor Has Been Doing for the Past 7 Years of His Life".

The first one gives away the story. The second one gets you interested in the story.

^ This. Both your titles and feature images are poor.

 

[Moe Bricks]

You are being too obvious with your titles and images. Since this is something that will rely on Facebook, and you want people browsing this on Facebook to click to your site, the main title and image should be used for piquing their interest as opposed to telling them the story.

Instead of "A Janitor Secretly Worked On This Mind-Boggling Maze For 7 Years Of His Life" it should be something like "You Won't Believe What this Janitor Has Been Doing for the Past 7 Years of His Life".

The first one gives away the story. The second one gets you interested in the story.

Good advice man, 'The Shocking Secret Past-time of a Janitor Whose Project Left Me Speechless', is good yes?

I'm stoked to start doing this, so easy... Actually take time to write quality articles and people are like 'hm, cool.' Show them some crazy images and they go into a wild fervor showing it to everybody. No wonder media has devolved into such a crapshoot.

 

[Instrumentalist]

You are being too obvious with your titles and images. Since this is something that will rely on Facebook, and you want people browsing this on Facebook to click to your site, the main title and image should be used for piquing their interest as opposed to telling them the story.

Instead of "A Janitor Secretly Worked On This Mind-Boggling Maze For 7 Years Of His Life" it should be something like "You Won't Believe What this Janitor Has Been Doing for the Past 7 Years of His Life".

The first one gives away the story. The second one gets you interested in the story.

Good advice. I think I got too wrapped up on the site itself, and assumed that getting clicks mostly hinged on the images themselves. But what you said makes sense, assuming my main source of traffic would be FB where titles are more important.

 

[mikeshinobi]

No offense, but everything you have on the site right now sucks ass. Keep at it though.

 

[Instrumentalist]

No offense, but everything you have on the site right now sucks ass. Keep at it though.

Lol, I really wish this was elaborated on.

I consider most of the people that browse Wickedfire to be of a higher intellect than the people we try to market to, meaning I wouldn't normally spend my time reading the kind of crap that's on these sort of sites. It's cheap brain-candy. That said, I see people post this kind of stuff on Facebook ALL THE TIME.

 

[Instrumentalist]

Cardine I take back what I said about the good advice. It was fucking great advice. I changed some of the titles and it feels like the site got a facelift.

I've always considered myself an SEO guy, so this will really help with my marketing chops.

 

[SteveGG]

Y'all's efforts to come up with clickbaity headlines is now being foiled...

The creator of the "Downworthy" app, Snipe, describes her particular aversion to these Upworthy-style headlines thusly:

[The] articles are, in general, not nearly as bad as their titles – but the titles have become SO overblown, they’re meaningless and annoying. But people still click, so the trend continues. Consider this me doing my part to stop the insanity.

In order to combat the endless stream of clickbait, Downworthy takes commonly used phrases and replaces them with much more realistic and honest versions. “Literally,” for example, becomes “Figuratively”; “Epic” becomes “Mundane”; “Will Change Your Life Forever” becomes “Will Not Change Your Life in ANY Meaningful or Lasting Way.”

http://www.geekosystem.com/downworthy/

 

[Moe Bricks]

Y'all's efforts to come up with clickbaity headlines is now being foiled...

The creator of the "Downworthy" app, Snipe, describes her particular aversion to these Upworthy-style headlines thusly:

[The] articles are, in general, not nearly as bad as their titles – but the titles have become SO overblown, they’re meaningless and annoying. But people still click, so the trend continues. Consider this me doing my part to stop the insanity.

In order to combat the endless stream of clickbait, Downworthy takes commonly used phrases and replaces them with much more realistic and honest versions. “Literally,” for example, becomes “Figuratively”; “Epic” becomes “Mundane”; “Will Change Your Life Forever” becomes “Will Not Change Your Life in ANY Meaningful or Lasting Way.”

http://www.geekosystem.com/downworthy/

Lol is this bitch for real? She's just mad cause a nigga gettin paid.

 

[mikeshinobi]

Lol, I really wish this was elaborated on.

I consider most of the people that browse Wickedfire to be of a higher intellect than the people we try to market to, meaning I wouldn't normally spend my time reading the kind of crap that's on these sort of sites. It's cheap brain-candy. That said, I see people post this kind of stuff on Facebook ALL THE TIME.

Well I was thinking about it, but it's hard to explain. Let's look at one you have and take a poke at it

This title is bad, but I can't explain why. It's just uninteresting. "This guy did an experiment and it was really cool". It's too generic? Too vague? I don't know. Then the picture you have afterwards is equally uninteresting, so the whole thing doesn't work.

The best I can come up with for this one would be something like this:

This Plant Hasn't Been Watered in 50 Years. You Won't Believe How It Keeps Itself Alive.

(this image isn't particularly interesting either, but it's the most interesting of the 3)

Don't take my word for it though; I don't even have a viral content site. I'm just some faggot on WF.

 

[mpbiz]

Instrumentalist, you just don't "get it" yet and that's fine. Once you study copywriting a little bit and spend some time writing everything out by hand you'll understand. I would go read some issues of the gary halbert letter, and then do some google searches for "headline swipe file" and "bullet swipe files".

You could probably not even spend time learning, and just plug into swipe files of headlines and bullets. in fact, if you want to get the ball rolling as fast as possible, just search for "jay abraham's 100 greatest headlines ever written" and then "gary bencevinga's bullets". Take those and swap in new words for your article and you're golden.

 

[SpaceMountain]

Google doesn't give a fuck about duplicate content, they care about copyrighted content.

At the bottom of each article on Viral Nova is a "Source: whatever.com" attribution link. The articles on Viral Nova look very similar to the originals --- especially the layout of photos --- but the content is always somewhat rewritten.

But what if they didn't rewrite the content? What if they copy&pasted it (even though they still put the attribution link) would they still be allowed to run adsense on the site?

(I've seen other sites sort of like Viral Noval/Distractify but they copy the content exactly and put an attribution link at the bottom, but I don't recall if they had adsense)

 

[Moe Bricks]

At the bottom of each article on Viral Nova is a "Source: whatever.com" attribution link. The articles on Viral Nova look very similar to the originals --- especially the layout of photos --- but the content is always somewhat rewritten.

But what if they didn't rewrite the content? What if they copy&pasted it (even though they still put the attribution link) would they still be allowed to run adsense on the site?

(I've seen other sites sort of like Viral Noval/Distractify but they copy the content exactly and put an attribution link at the bottom, but I don't recall if they had adsense)

Yes, as I said before, Google literally doesn't care about duplicate content. You can copy and paste articles and still be able to rank them above the original in Google, but the AdSense terms of service says it has issues with copyrighted material, so you have to watch out for that particularly.

 

[SpaceMountain]

Thanks for the reply, but I disagree, unless if I misunderstood. If one does a search on: duplicate content "ad serving has been disabled" There's plenty of cases of people who got their adsense ads shut off because of dupe content.

I went back and looked at those few sites with totally scraped (but attributed) content, and yea, none of them had adsense -- all display ads from other sources. I looked at their robots.txt and one had googlebot disallowed - I guess that's a way to help prevent the original website from seeing that this site had scraped their content (by searching on a random line of text).

Then again, I guess the preferred traffic method to a totaly scraped site is FB, reddit, etc - not the serps. And the preferred monetization is NOT adsense.



Any autobloggers still out there who might want to throw their $.02 into this?

 

[Enigmabomb]

I've been considering writing a CMS to run a site like this. Maybe it's time.

 

[Instrumentalist]

Quick update for anyone still interested. I bought a new domain because I thought of something catchier, and I'm surprised it wasn't already taken. Pop TNT - What's blowing up?

Imported all the posts from my other site, added some new ones, created a paging layout for image sets, and posted a couple things to my measly 1,400 followers on Pinterest. Here's some stats since I started tracking on the 27th.

It ain't much, but those bounce rates and pages/visits are promising. And I'm glad I put a lot of focus on creating a completely fluid layout, seeing as most of my traffic has been coming from mobile devices.

Anyway, it's a start. Still working on those titles...but I'm not overly concerned about perfection. Just getting it out there is more important to me right now. All the while I will read up on whatever I can about headline writing and put things into practice as I chug along.

 

[mituozo]

Quick update for anyone still interested. I bought a new domain because I thought of something catchier, and I'm surprised it wasn't already taken. Pop TNT - What's blowing up?

Imported all the posts from my other site, added some new ones, created a paging layout for image sets, and posted a couple things to my measly 1,400 followers on Pinterest. Here's some stats since I started tracking on the 27th.

It ain't much, but those bounce rates and pages/visits are promising. And I'm glad I put a lot of focus on creating a completely fluid layout, seeing as most of my traffic has been coming from mobile devices.

Anyway, it's a start. Still working on those titles...but I'm not overly concerned about perfection. Just getting it out there is more important to me right now. All the while I will read up on whatever I can about headline writing and put things into practice as I chug along.

Get rid of the ads, they'll only pay you pennies for now anyway.

Add them later once/if you have huge social traction. You don't want to do anything that'll stop stuff going viral at this stage. Also, when I land on your homepage I see a wordpress admin bar at the top of the page? "Howdy, doncecil".

 

[Instrumentalist]

I see a wordpress admin bar at the top of the page? "Howdy, doncecil".

Seriously? That should only be there for logged in users. That's fucking strange as hell. Can you access the admin panel through that?

Edit: I figured it out. W3 Total Cache was caching the admin bar when I had page cache turned on. That's fucked up.

Thanks for pointing that out.

 

[StraightUp]

What an amateur.

 

[StraightUp]

On topic now:

1. You should remove the ads
2. You should SELL that share button:
2.1 Remove share button from post header (no one is going to share it before even reading it)
2.2 There are way too many distractions when I want to share the article (assuming I want...).
Remove the custom text "Share if you like this".
Remove "Facebook - Google+ - Privacy & Copyright".
Remove the 728, you can add a 300x250 later, acting as an exit for those who don't want to share.

Replace the share button at the bottom. The size is good but it's design sucks, you need to add something responsive, modern design and retina ready (most of the traffic will be mobile, depending how you target, if you target). A good design can drive traffic, things like fonts used can convert users into sharing your article.