With more than five years of experience publishing articles online, the opportunity arises to reflect on which topics have been most successful in attracting visitors and which articles have been most effective in persuading readers to click on a website. To deal with the obvious first, the word sex is by far the strongest magnet and any article with a title that includes this magic word is sure to be scanned for content that doesn’t pass existing censorship rules. It is the topics ranked second, third and beyond that are of more serious interest even though their scores may lag significantly behind the leader.
All topics related to personal appearance have proven to be attractive to viewers. Surprisingly, articles on African men’s clothing and hairstyles have attracted more views than topics on African women. However, in terms of promoting URL clicks to a commercial website, the most effective articles have been on women’s clothing, with an article on plus-size silk dresses in Vietnam achieving a URL click-through rate of 24%. percent with 38 clicks from 158 visits.
Health articles address a primary human concern and attract above-average attention. An article on homeopathic medicine became the author’s fourth most read article after ten months, among articles that had been active for three or four years, and an article on health in West Africa, published in January 2013, was much seen during the ebola outbreak. of the following years, although readers must have been disappointed that he did not mention the current crisis. After health should rank food and drink as a topic of universal interest, with an article on alcoholic beverages in Ghana coming in thirteenth on the overall list of over 500.
In view of these fairly obvious topics of widespread personal interest, it’s reassuring to note that topics of special interest can also get fair exposure. In the present author’s case, this was the culture and development of the Ashanti Region of Ghana. Four articles on culture are ranked in the top twenty. At number six there is an article on the famous proverbs of the Akans, at number nine an account of the mythical forest creatures known as mmoatia, at number sixteen there is an article on the association of trees with place names, and at number sixteen number twenty is a description of a traditional Ashanti compound house.
Despite its rich traditional culture, Ghana is not resting on its laurels. Many of the author’s articles describe pioneering efforts in grassroots industrial development, and thirteen of these articles rank in the top fifty. In particular, there are five accounts from individual engineers and scientists who played prominent roles on the show. It’s nice that in a situation where most potential viewers are primarily searching for topics of personal interest, these valuable folks can still get adequate exposure for their exploits.