Controversial Joomla Blog Posts

Blogging

Written by Steve Burge

Controversial Joomla Blog Posts In the last few days a particularly controversial blog post has made some people in the Joomla world angry. On the OpenJason.com blog, there was an article reviewing various Joomla template clubs. It made comments about some template designers that included phrases such as:

"Piss poor quality"
"If I wanted to get kicked in the nuts, I'd go to these guys"
"I can't even muster up a .5 rating for these idiots. The templates suck"

Should you use controversial blog posts to get more people reading your blog?

Yes, occasionally, especially if your post contains controversial facts rather than controversial opinions. However there are two major potential pitfalls:

If you make a habit of controversial posts, people will see your advice as being unprofessional and therefore less valuable.
If you need to retract some or all of your controversial post, as OpenJason did, you'll be taking one step forward and two steps back in terms of building trust with your audience.

Writing a Controversial and Useful Blogs Post

I've got to say I didn't like Jason's post because it was full of low-quality, non-constructive opinions.

However, he does have a much better post that is still controversial: "Joomla!: How to publish 100+ articles everyday, in less than 2 minutes".

In this post he explains how you can easily use the Feedgator component and JosReplace mambot to import floods of other people's content into your Joomla site and then make it appear as if you wrote it. You might not like the fact that he's explaining how to turn Joomla into a Wordpress-style spam producing tool, but if you're interested in SEO its important you know what tactics other people are using and Jason has written a really good tutorial.

Note: Reading Jason's tutorial will remind you why (although your readers might find it useful) you should never provide full RSS Feeds.

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Your Comments (6)

David Towers

December 05, 2007

His blog post about how to use Joomla as a spam machine is clever but devious!

His template review is somewhat interesting. I am sure the way he writes will amuses some people. But personally I thought the Joomlajet templates are actually good for small businesses. Anyways, as always, everybody has their opinions. lol

Rick Russell

December 07, 2007

His site is down. Looks like Mr. Open Jason needs to write a review on which hosting companies suck and which ones don't. He could be getting thousands of hits right now. Hrmm, maybe I'll do one, I've had to deal with 6 major ones this year...

David Towers

December 07, 2007

Hey noneck, openjason is working for me!! Who do you host with BTW?

OpenJason

December 18, 2007

I'm happy to see you all have read a few of my postings... regarding the Joomla! Template Review, I acknowledge that it really upset a lot of people. To be honest, that was the objective. I said some things about JoomlaJunkie initially, but then retracted. See, Chris, from JoomlaJunkie was clearly very upset with the rating I gave... Upon review, I realized he truly didn't deserve it. What people need to understand is that I have no intention of being "professional" on my blog... I do, however, use OpenJason to drive traffic and make money from ads. Writing these posts has driven people to the site, whether or not you like the content. It's controversial. So, NOT writing this way is "unprofessional," as far as I'm concerned.

I really appreciate your time guys... and thanks to Alledia for sending a lot of traffic to the site...

Jason

David Towers

December 18, 2007

Hey Jason! It would be interesting for you to post the spike in traffic and ad revenue (if there was one!) you saw after posting the Joomla template review and if the traffic numbers to your site have jumped since the blogpost.

Steve Burge

December 19, 2007

Hi Jason

Thanks for posting here. Glad to see you changed your mind about JoomlaJunkie - they're great guys.

Absolutely - posts like that work for traffic, although I think the returns diminish over time.

My personal opinion is that I much preferred your controversial, fact-based tutorial about FeedGator than the other post that relied on hot-air.