Right Place, Right Time

[animalstyle]

Woke up this morning to this:

Normally at this time I would be just over 100 sessions for the day, an 850 session spike overnight. Thought for sure I had a big spike from social media shares, but looking at the traffic sources, this is nearly all organic traffic.

The page on my site that saw this traffic is a profile for a business that has yet to open. The idea that brought me here has proven itself again and again and I wanted to share it here:

Get there first. The example for me is coming from a business directory standpoint, but I believe the general idea could be applied creatively in other ways.

When a business is starting up in the industry my site revolves around, it is often the case that they don't throw lots of energy into their web presence. It is easy for me to add them to my directory as "upcoming" and start ranking for terms surrounding that business. This also helps my visitors, paints a better picture of the marketplace. By publishing content early, I generally move my way up the rankings quickly. You can capture early traffic (and emails). As time moves on and the business eventually opens, there is likely to be an home page and some big sites that come and battle you for the top spot(assuming you have it), but you've aged and normally you stick around up near the top as well.

The great thing about this (especially in the early stages) is that you capture offline marketing efforts. What likely happened in my case today was some TV press sent people to the search engines, and your's truly is there to capture it.

 

[Ryuzaki]

This is basically the approach of all journalists, whether on TV, magazines, newspapers, or websites... who can break the news first? But like you said, someone else can swoop in and take over later, but you want that early hype, social signals, links, and traffic. Good job, man.

 

[juliantrueflynn]

Just to be sure, you closely checked out the traffic to see if it wasn't spam? For example sexyali.com gives fake organic spam traffic and I'm sure you're heard of other referrer spam.

Otherwise nice going.

 

[animalstyle]

Just to be sure, you closely checked out the traffic to see if it wasn't spam? For example sexyali.com gives fake organic spam traffic and I'm sure you're heard of other referrer spam.

Otherwise nice going.

Valid point, and for sure I checked - not spam. Found the article that caused the traffic spike as well, some reality TV article of all things.

Thanks for the feedback

 

[juliantrueflynn]

Very cool then. I'm just always finicky with web traffic and using it for goals/accomplishments. I've had too many false calls (ie. local site getting foreign traffic, referrer spam, etc.), don't want to seem like I'm just being negative.

 

[animalstyle]

You've got a very valid point though.

When I see the traffic and the email subscriptions spike together then I know shit's real, and that's what I saw this morning.

 

[animalstyle]

This traffic is on the other side of the world from me. The article that caused the stream was posted in the evening (their time) and died off late in the evening. Now its early morning over there and the traffic is starting to come back up

On top of this, today I leveraged some industry assets by getting them to submit content to my site which prompted them to share my site on Facebook, so I am getting that traffic too. I am sitting at about 150 sessions for the day above my previous best day for this project. Fun day Tempted to email my list with an update just to set the bar high.

 

[animalstyle]

This is basically the approach of all journalists, whether on TV, magazines, newspapers, or websites... who can break the news first? But like you said, someone else can swoop in and take over later, but you want that early hype, social signals, links, and traffic. Good job, man.

Today I created a new page continuing to play on this tactic. A news outlet made an announcement which had me set up a business profile for the upcoming business. I also took it a step further by traffic leaking the comments on the news article that made the first announcement. This netted me a link to the new page on my site plus some quality leaked traffic. Traffic + authority all rolled into one. Going to see how fast I rank for the term.