Seven tips for success in generating views and comments:
1. Post on a Friday or Saturday (even among the many AW retirees, the weekend is when the browsers come out)…
2. Put a currently popular name or topic in the post title (to grab extra views from the easily distracted goldfish among us)…
3. Choose a theme that everyone has an opinion on or experience of…
4. Invite YT clips around a familiar word, theme or genre…
5. Mention present or past AW regulars, preferably in the title…
6. Mention a band/artist who’s been on the front cover of Mojo/Uncut many times…
7. Put ‘Wordle’ in the title…
8. Specifically ask for examples/additions to the points made in the OP…
9. Make a deliberate error in the OP to encourage corrections and clarifications…
Any more?
Not necessarily title clickbait, but frequently generating amusing comments –
1 – Add a double entendre and ponder the whereabouts of Moose.
2 – Refer to someone’s performance in Twin Peaks as being rather good, especially if they weren’t in it.
3 – Allude to the unexplained absence of Gerry Rafferty.
4. Brian Kennedy
5. … Kennedy
Curate your own OP by replying to the contributions of others, perhaps containing a (ahem, “deliberate”) misunderstanding to stimulate further responses.
Or, you could always diss Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey or the Fab Four while you’re at it.
Well, I won’t be doing any of that.
Oh!!
Glad you realised, otherwise somebody else would have had to point it out to you!
I don’t think we’re very good at clickbait titles. There should be more like these:
You won’t BELIEVE what Richard Thompson is planning next!
Forthcoming Pentangle retrospective 12 CD box set will drop your jaw!
New Macca live album will have you SCREAMING AT THE TOP OF YOUR VOICE and SOILING your TROUSERS !
10 prog albums your doctor doesn’t want you to hear. You won’t believe number six.
Suffolk woman’s 50p LP cleaning hack record companies don’t want you to know about.
“Prog: you’ve been doing it wrong all these years!!!”
“Add THIS music to your morning routine and shrink your prostate!!!”
“This 30-LP box set is VERY, VERY expensive but, once the 500 copies worldwide have been sold, it will be worth a lot of money on eBay”.
Of course, the first comment will be ‘you have to be dead’.
And the second, ‘your children are ‘simply bound’ to thank you for the advantage you’ve just given them on the property ladder’.
Ask The Massive
Preferable about a Mac problem so your choice of operating system can be dissed … again
Say how new speaker cables transformed the sound on 128 spotify bluetooth sound set up
Arf x2!
Buy a FiiO.
What a mean-spirited comment.
“Everyone in the Afterword is saying the same thing”
“Afterworders’ FURY at new no-hits Clash revelation”.
Who can possibly defend this? Time to throw out those albums? Footage emerges of McCartney with Epstein.
I can’t think of any clickbait, but have produced many a clicktrap response, snaring even the most of active piece from continuing.
Say you like U2.
Oh! The ‘cancellation’ of Morrissey, Ryan Adams, Woody Allen etc etc
Simply place an artists name in the header, press post, sit back and wait.
Views will be generated expecting an RIP
I did one back in the days of the Word magazine.
‘We’re the Beatles really that good’
I got more abuse than praise that’s for sure.
For content or grammar?
New Beatles box set with two never seen before photos.
I think I might have posted this too late on Saturday to really catch the weekend traffic, and now it’s Monday afternoon, when only those of us still occupied with kids at home are freer now than on Sat/Sun.
What ARE the 7 reliable techniques for revitalizing a flagging thread?
1. Draft an additional thoughtpiece to bring it to the top of the recently updated chart?
a temporary solution that lasts until 20 other threads have been responded to
2. Go through the comments made so far and reply to every one, thus generating a whole flotilla of entries to the ‘Updates’ /Site-wide activity view.
Only for true AW connoisseurs, who hover expectantly over every/any change to the site
3. Put links to the thread in other posts?
Smacks of desperation
4. Share the URL on Facebook/X/Steve Hoffman?
No right-thinking cove would dream of such underhandedness
5. Start tagging AWers in the hope they’ll respond to such prodding?
One can howl wolf only so many times
6. Put another deliberate error in the comment to draw in the pedants?
Careful, you’ll get a reputation for carelessness
What could possibly work?
Try and persuade a lapsed AW member to make an inflammatory comment by proxy or make something up…so and so wrote to me…
Say it’s your birthday or you are seriously ill, a close relative has died. You’ve been made homeless etc
“In a postcard sent from aboard Stephen King’s yacht, HP Saucecraft tells me their cruise around the Mekong Delta is most pleasant and work on his new roman a clef proceeds apace”
I knew a man whose brother said he knew a man who knew the Oxford Girl.
@salwarpe – you could always just go:
>>> bump
The annoying Google THIS gambit increasingly in evidence, designed to make you click if you don’t want to remain in ignorance. Random examples now available.
Australia 2025 Seniors Card Update – New Rule Changes Surprise Many Pensioners.
This airline’s reputation is bad, and it lives up to it.
I’m calling it: this old-school joint serves the best fish and chips in NSW. (I clicked on this one, but it’s 852 effing km away…)
Etihad Airways Launching Flights to This New US Destination Ahead.
etc. etc.