Earlier this year an opportunity came my way. After spying a tweet from a prolific technology blog looking for new contributors, I figured that I would have nothing to loose by giving it a shot.

Emails were sent and the first round of articles quickly followed. Some days passed and I received a flow up email from said top 3 tech site. They like what they had read and we’re hoping that I could do something more for them and we discussed availability for articles.

This was discussed and the second round of articles sent.

And then… Nothing. They went quiet. The only reason I could fathom is that my ‘not 24 hours a day’ availability had not been what they were looking to hear but the content was right for them.

Slightly dejected, I decided to turn the frown upside down and brought in the new Tame Geek 2014 site design and started really looking in to what can be done for content in the digital age.

As the months have rolled on, I have still kept on reading the aforementioned news site and they have changed too. Not what you’d call for the better.

You may be familiar with the term ‘clickbait’. It breaks down as such;

• You find information on another website, so you decide that content will be right for your readers.
• Your site has a larger readership, but they may have already seen the article.
• The best thing to do is write a sensationalist headline that give away nothing, thus hopefully enticing visitors to click.
• The more that click on to the page, the more adverts get viewed, the greater advertising return for the website.

These headlines often follow a few noticeable patterns:

• You won’t believe what X has over Y
• X you never knew about Y will change your life
• Secret from X makes Y amazing and you have to try it

These headlines with a salacious image get people on to pages and ‘monitize clicks and visits’.

That is what has happen to this once most reliable source of information has now become a shadow of it’s self, sacrificing content for cash.
That’s something I wouldn’t want to be a part of, and that, is how I dodged a bullet by not getting what I wanted.

There’s some deeper lessons this experience has taught me and they are:

• If you have standards, stick to them where necessary, exceed them where possible
• What you think you want, may not actually be what you need
• The seeing where someone else went wrong way usually makes your path clearer

Hopefully, those will be useful to you too.