In Build Your Anime Blog, I shared Otaku Journalist’s most popular posts of all time. I told readers each of these posts were successful for two reasons:

• It was on a topic people were already discussing.
• It included original material you can’t easily find elsewhere.

Now, I think there may have been a third reason these posts did well. They each elicited an emotional response.

I was thinking about it this weekend when a story I wrote suddenly got lots of attention. My article was about an organization that Photoshopped pictures of female videogame characters. It’s definitely one of my ConAir stories, as Helen would say. I wrote it on a Thursday and didn’t think about it until Saturday, when lots of people began commenting on my article and sending me tweets and email. Most of these comments had one thing in common—people were angry.

It turned out my colleague, Erik Kain, wrote a follow-up story on the subject that linked to mine and revitalized the topic. Though my story was neutral, many people reached out to me taking offense at my title’s assertion that overweight women can “look great.”

It sucks that the catalyst was how women’s bodies should or shouldn’t look, but what’s incredible about this story is that it inspired people to take action. They didn’t just passively read it, they shared it on social media and reached out to me with their opinions. Their enthusiasm made this my most popular story for July. I pessimistically told my Forbes mentor, Susannah Breslin, that now that I write for hits, this told me I could make more money inciting anger than dispensing information. Her response snapped me out of it:

“I think people click to feel something.”

People come to the news each morning to feel. They want to be uplifted, reassured, and yes, sometimes righteously enraged. But all the best journalism calls us to action. Good blog posts inspire us to comment, and maybe write follow up posts of our own. For example, when I read a particularly striking review from Bobduh or Josei Next Door, it inspires me to try a new anime.

In the future, I’d like to avoid articles that make people angry, but even that can have its place. In the New York Times, an exposé of nail salons in New York inspired hundreds to boycott manicures and pressured the governor into ordering an emergency measure. It was a well-reported story that made people shocked and angry—but for a very good reason.

An article that makes people emotional can be a very positive thing. People come to the news not only to be informed, but to take away a feeling with that new knowledge. What will your next article or blog post inspire people to do?

When I first started my career as a journalist, the reader comment I most dreaded seeing was “this isn’t news.” It made me feel like I was wasting time and not providing any value with my work.

I didn’t think about this fear of mine while I was being paid hourly. But now, at Forbes, I get paid based on how many hits my articles get.

That means to make enough to live on, I need to be constantly publishing. To adapt, I’ve developed a scattershot approach to blogging, where I vary the amount of effort I put into each post to keep my output high. That means that for every multi-source feature on waifus, there’s a less intensive opinion piece on something like, say, Wonder Woman’s shoes.

At first, I felt guilty about these shorter pieces. When I started at Forbes in June, I planned to make every single article a feature with a week of reporting behind it. Even if a story seemed accurate and informative with just one interview, I thought it would serve my audience even better if it had two more interviews and an extra 1,000 words.

Luckily my brilliant editor, Helen Popkin, stressed early how important quick pieces are with what she calls the “ConAir Method.” It goes like this:

In order to get the studio backing to make Grosse Pointe Blank, John Cusack agreed to be in ConAir, a lowbrow movie he really wasn’t interested in. But since ConAir was a box office hit, Cusack was able to jump right from that to his passion project.

I didn’t understand how this made sense, until I discovered just how often readers are clicking on the low effort pieces. Readers want to be educated, but they also want to be entertained.

That’s the dirty secret of journalism: there is zero correlation between how much effort you put into an article and how much traffic it gets. Just look at Buzzfeed’s lists for proof. Or this little story about Ghostbusters and Internet Rule 63, which took me 20 minutes to write—but got thousands of hits.

Obviously, I am not in favor of “clickbait,” which misleads or flat out misinforms your audience. I’m just saying that some blog posts, like opinion pieces, profiles, and photo galleries, can be interesting and informative without being taking a lot of your time and effort.

I realized I’ve been snubbing things as “not news” before even giving my readers the chance. I’ve been letting my perfectionist tendencies take over. Now, I let the audience decide.

Your audience isn’t waiting around for your masterpiece. They don’t care how long it took to write. They just want to see what you have to offer them today. Let them decide if it’s news.