I thought it would be a good idea to share my success story, along with how I did it. Many of you know I'm promoting www.bkweddings.com right now. The site is in its infancy, but I wanted to start generating some real traffic before I release some tools that I'm developing. The site is all about weddings, and one of the most important things to do is release timely information. Renee Zellweger recently got married, so I posted an article up on the site. Immediately, I put up a few network ads and directed a significant amount of my weight towards those ads. Within 24 hours it became the most highly visited page on my site, multiplying my average daily visitors by more than a factor of 5. Also interesting is that not only did it increase the visitors - the visitors stayed and visited other pages, made comments, and of course clicked through my advertisements. Most articles that I have up at this point have anywhere from 0 to 2 comments. This particular article has nearly 60. The thing that I think is most important is the fact that the article was news. There was not a lot of competition out there for search terms because this wedding was a secret beforehand - the public was unaware that the couple was engaged. Because of this, and because of the strength of the co-op, I not only received decent search engine rankings, I also saw a good deal of click throughs from co-op sites as well. Targetting common search terms is important, no doubt, but hot news is very important as well. It's especially effective if the news is not something that media outlets have already been pushing for a length of time already. The traffic will not stick, as searches will quickly drop off, but hopefully I've made enough of an impression on those visitors that they will check back regularly. For those interested in stats, my visitor count went from an average daily number below 700 to nearly 5000 and has dropped off since it's peak to 1100-ish. Similarly, I tried the same with the Heidi Klum wedding to Seal. I didn't receive any good serps because there were already several outlets with more information since this wedding had been publicly planned for some time (and with my site in it's infancy I had not had a chance to report on it). So like I said - hot news, new news is great. Instinctively I wanted to keep this to myself and use it as my "secret strategy", but then I thought - if I tell other users, then they will do the same and the quality of ads in the network will be better - and with the quality of the network improving, the number of sites in the network will improve and the effectiveness of the advertising will improve. So please... do the same when you get a chance. Share your success stories and strategies because sharing them will make them even more effective! Besides... the network is only part of a marketing plan. If I'm only doing one thing to promote a site, then anybody can do the same and improve on my success. It takes continuous hard work and multi-faceted marketing strategies to be consistently at the top.
Steven, That is a very unique idea...never thought of that one. Unfortunately there isn't much news in my most of my niche's. Was that mainly SE traffic? From all 3 or mainly google? Thanks for sharing. Brandon
The primary traffic came from Yahoo where I ranked top for "Chesney Wedding" - which isn't a term that I had specifically targetted from ads. I had targetted things like "Zelwegger Chesney Weddng" though.