There are various ways to bring in more traffic to your website and one way I recently discovered is to be one of the first to break news on a topic that is trending or soon to be trending.
Recently, there was an awkward change in my usual Facebook News Feed. I noticed that many of the women in my feed were changing their Facebook Status’ to a color, and most of the comments in regards to these status updates were comments of confusion—mostly from men.
I immediately went to Google to clear up my confusion, and found out that the color represented the color of the bra the users’ were wearing. This trend was part of a breast cancer awareness initiative. The results on Google were limited to two or three sites with information relevant to what I was searching.
My SEO mindset kicked in and I decided that this would be a great opportunity for me to bring in more traffic to the blog. I quickly wrote a blog post that I felt would grab attention and engage the reader and posted it including all keywords I felt were relevant to the topic.
About 10 minutes after posting the blog, it was already on page one of Google, and quickly moved up the ranks to position 6.
Unfortunately, there were some issues; one being that our blog’s bandwidth couldn’t accommodate the large amount of traffic in such a short period of time.
In just over an hour, I was able to get over 1,000 viewers to our company’s blog, right before the site went down from being over capacity.
One thing that needs to be said is that this traffic wasn’t constant. I did not have the same 1,000-plus traffic that I did the previous day. It seems that it was such a hot topic that larger companies, like Mashable and ABC News, picked it up—along with just about anyone else that had a blog.
One way to keep this from happening is to offer your readers more information, such as an update, that will hopefully bring them back. In this case, an update that offered to find out where this breast cancer initiative started.
Most importantly, even though this may lead to rushed publishing of information, content is still king, so make sure what you post is accurate and free of grammatical errors.
3 Comments
It is very challenging to understand how to grow online traffic without getting an online marketing degree, or coaching, or choosing to outsource. Marketing requires a disciplined approach towards assessing the customer’s need, the viability of the solution, and the market niche. It is critical to have at least a summary understanding of the market size, demographics, and competition as well as cyclical trends for your web site and the products it offers.
Some observations about web traffic are:
1. It grows organically if you don’t have big marketing budget. (One friend of mine has a blog that has grown to 15,000 regular visitors per month. She is an excellent writer and her diary of family life with a twist of a wry sense of humor makes reading her blog very addictive.)
2. It is essential to establish trust with your online viewers.
3. Be sure to grow a list of your site visitors through email address and name (if possible) capture. This can be achieved by offering a free E-Book or a product that is of real value to the visitor.
4. Make use of social media (e.g. Twitter, bookmarks) to promote your site.
5. You cannot build web traffic without being a participant in the whole Internet / blogosphere realms. If you are isolated, your website will not grow.
Most importantly, create a value proposition of your website. It always should start with “It helps “ and include a target audience and what problems it will help to solve. For example, “my web site helps new parents find affordable goods and services by providing cost saving coupons”.
Regarding training, here is a detailed and excellent course on how to use free tools and methodologies to build web traffic and market your product:
http://bit.ly/4JDBDD
This could be hard when your new into these kind of strategy.
I periodically visit http://www.google.com/trends to search for news trends. Once I find a trendy news related to my niches, I immediately do a market research on the topic, write a relevant article and post on my blog. To make this traffic generating strategy work effectively, I usually post one article per day for about two weeks. Then three times a week for a week, two times the following week, a one time the week after – It all depends on how hot the news is. This simple strategy produces more traffic to my sites than some of my Google Adwards ads! The good part is it’s free : -) …
I am somehow surprised that it’s not a topic that the so called experts talk about often! Maybe they don’t want you to know…
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