Want more visitors to your blog? Use this simple five-letter word. By: Dennis Bailey

Everybody wants to get more website traffic and more visitors to their blog, right? Want to know an easy way to do it?

It's a simple five-letter word, but I'm not going to use it here. Why? Because when I used it in an earlier blog post, along with a picture of a certain person who also shall remain nameless, my blog exploded with thousands of hits in a single day, nearly 10,000 visits in less than a month. If I use these words again, I'm afraid I'll get the same result – people all over the world who are eagerly searching for those words or phrases will end up on my site, clogging my daily metrics. And for reasons I'll get into I'd just as soon avoid this.

Forgive me for being circumspect, but here's what happened. There's this big story going on in Maine right now involving – I don't even want to use the word. A woman has been arrested who supposedly operated a certain kind of dance studio (the five-letter word that rhymes with "roomba") but in reality offered something entirely different to her paying clients, something more intimate and illicit. Are you with me?

So a controversy has ensued, not only over the woman's arrest and her, ahem, "business partner," but also the clients who frequented her establishment. The police have been slowly releasing the names of the customers, every other week, and they've been showing up in local newspapers.

So, since I offer crisis management services, I wrote a simple blog post about the predicament these gentlemen find themselves in and speculated about whether there is anything that could be done to mitigate the publicity and their embarrassment. (Short answer: not much.) I included a somewhat exotic picture of the woman on my blog and her name in the caption.

Then the fun started. Visits to my blog exploded, going from a few dozen per day to over 1,000. Everybody it seemed was searching for information (and pictures) about this case, from all over the world. She's become an Internet sensation. Her photos are all over the web. There's even a site dedicated to the case with a countdown clock for when the next list of gentleman callers are due to be released.

It's getting out of hand. Lots of people are interested in this case, to an almost creepy degree. How do I know? Well, it isn't hard to check the IP address to see who's landing on my site and what pages they're looking at. Many of the IP addresses are company names presumably where the viewer works, or should be working instead of cruising the internet for sexy photos.

Here's just a sampling of some of the businesses whose employees, for one reason or another, are apparently "researching" this case:

• Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield
• Cisco Systems, Inc.
• Penn State College of Medicine
• The Proctor and Gamble Company
• Oregon State System of Higher Education
• US House of Representatives
• General Motors Corporation
• Central Intelligence Agency
• The Hertz Corporation
• Northrop Grumman Corp.
• Microsoft Corp.
• Homeland Security

And these are just a few of the US firms landing on my site. There are many more from countries all around the world. (And I've left out some of the local businesses and law firms to spare them the embarrassment. You know who you are. Stop it.)

Now, I should be happy that all these big-name companies are coming to my blog, right? They're at least discovering my firm and what I do (besides posting pictures of nekked women). Attracting viewers by being topical and controversial is certainly a way for a blog to go viral. There's actually a name for it – it's called "newsjacking," piggybacking on a hot news item by writing a blog post or press release that generates a spike in the number of viewers.
The problem is, so far at least, all this attention hasn't resulted in a single "quality lead," the whole purpose of a business blog. Despite all the brand name companies coming to my site, they're here for the pictures, not to do business with Savvy. The number of monthly visitors to my blog has certainly increased, but the conversion rate is next to nothing.
So that's the moral of this story. If all you want to do is increase your website traffic and bring in lots of new visitors, use that simple five letter word or print the woman's name in question and her picture. But be careful what you wish for. And you better hurry. With all the other websites and blogs popping up devoted to this topic, it's getting crowded out there, which is why I think that my website traffic is slowing falling back to normal.
And sometimes normal is good.