An extremely popular blogger in the ‘business‘ niche once told me the story of how he manipulated web2.0 to his own advantage.

The blogger wrote exclusively about business and financial topics and posted to his blog 8-9 times per week. He had a large following and was rapidly becoming known as an expert in his field. One day he departed from his usual style and wrote a post on his business blog about…swimming pool safety…

and there was a riot!

He told me that he received massive amounts of e-mails saying that he’d “lost it” and that he was risking his readership to write such an off-topic post. He received almost 80 comments on the post and nearly every one of them called the post “stupid” and that it did nothing to help his readers succeed in business.

Behind the scenes, the blogger was smiling. While he had often found it hard to get noticed on Digg-like sites due to the competitiveness of the ‘business’ category, the ‘home’ category was far less competitive. By targeting this “soft category” and leveraging the power of his social network, he managed to get the post voted to the front page of three content-sharing sites.

The result was a massive amount of traffic and a number of high PR one-way links pointing to his site.  He was very happy!

I asked him if he cared about the negative feedback that he received from his readership and he replied that it was just for one post amongst the thousands that he had written and that he would keep doing it as long as he got the same results. The traffic he received far outweighed the negative feedback and actually had the effect of helping his blog grow rather than hurt it.

What’s the moral of the story? A lot more wealth and power is created behind the scenes than what you see on the front page of a site. If you see a post entitled “What Halo3 taught me about Linux” on your favorite gardening blog - there’s probably a very good reason for it.

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