What do you think about having a site that not many people search for, and thus has few decent keywords, but is really interesting, and certain people would enjoy it while surfing randomly? I ask because the other day someone asked for a site review, and I looked at it, it was a site about mystics and strange people like Aleister Crowley. I can't remember the link now. I would never have searched for that stuff, but I thought it was interesting. (That site may indeed be searched for a lot, I don't know, but it made me think of this question). I guess what I'm thinking is that there is more traffic available from just searches and people already interested in something. But how to harness it?
I'm asking for people's opinions about sites that surfers find "accidentally", but which are interesting and might generate clicks/income. Obviously webmasters target people who are interested in a particular topic--keyword emphasis, SEO, backlinks from relevant pages, posting in related forums, etc--but I imagine it doesn't have to stop there. Anyone ever thought about harnessing the zillions of people who AREN'T searching for your keywords, but WOULD be interested if they stumbled across your site?
You would want to make sure you do everything you mentioned above very well before thinking of other marketing angles. It's your most targetted audience so you want to exploit that. Then you can look to other ways of traffic generation.
Remember that million dollar website and the hamster dance one, new ideas is important, you can target your audience from sites like digg.
I think he is probably saying a new niche without any searches now might become an important niche for the future.
Frankly, you are talking about the beginning of the web. Back then, what little marketing there was, was carefully blended with content. Most sites were created around people's interests -- whether mystics, astrology, cars, programming, or poetry. The web was seen as a place to explore these interests and build community around them. Those ideals were lost over the years and the vast majority of websites are created solely to exploit the target audience. If you are interested in something pursue it. The web would be a much better place if people tried to have some proportion of sites whose sole purpose was to inform.
Even though I may make a site or a page with a particular keyword in mind, alot of traffic will come from obscure searches that seems to match a few words in my content. This is the whole idea behind building content. e.g. I made a hobby site about a C-List celebrity in the UK and included a short article about this persons favourite alcoholic drinks. 2 months later I was getting traffic from google for searches for obscure drink brands that were in my article. and the moral of the story is...
Yer the hamster dance one was... www.hamsterdance.com But they have bundled loads of ads on the page and new remixes...it was better when the whole page was dancing hamsters, they never used adsense on them tho. the million dollar one didnt need any adverts, hes now a rich student, quitre annoying really ive been working a couple of years on the web, hes a smart ass and thought of something so simple, but it worked! www.milliondollarhomepage.com/
http://www.hamsterdance.com/classorig.html While the graphics seem like the original, the song is not.
Well, google brings me visitors searching for alcoholic drinks and google adsense displays some ads related to the same topic. After I found out why people were landing on that page I emphasised those words in the article and the adsense ads changed accordingly. So initially untargeted visitors, but now very targeted.
So would it work like this: drink search -> your page -> not interested in this celebrity, but click an ad Good replies everyone, interesting that it once again all comes back to content. I can't imagine a zillion-dollar company like Google really cares about the quality of the internet, but their system does seem to encourage it.