News Ticker

(Expert Feature) Increase Blog Traffic with Timely Online Content

How to increase blog traffic

We all love to read great online content that supports upcoming events.

Staying up to date on current events helps us to be knowledgable and after all most of us enjoy an engaging water cooler discussion.

Seriously, this article is a follow-up to last month’s article on the use of editorial calendars for planning your online content and social media campaigns.

The timeliness of content involves simply using current happenings from top news stories to seasonal events such as holidays for publishing online content that stands a higher probability of high search ranking.

We see this technique used often by top news sites and bloggers and are always impressed with how much traffic they generate.

Favorite Example

A favorite example was when a nearly unknown mommy blogger received an enormous amount of traffic for an article she wrote and posted the week before daylight savings time instructing searchers when to change their clocks.

That week, she ranked high for the phrase “daylight savings time” and captured a good portion of the traffic for that phrase.

The most important rule is to make sure to pick topics that are consistent with your subject matter.

Halloween Costumes And Timely Content

For example, let’s say that a business sells Halloween costumes and wants to grab traffic in the weeks leading up to the holiday. Of course, it makes sense to optimize the Halloween costumes category page in the shopping cart for phrases like “Halloween Costumes”, “Kids Halloween Costumes”, etc.

However, we found a lot of other phrases related to Halloween that could be used in a Halloween-related blog post to capture even more traffic. For example, we found 201,000 searches last October for the phrase “Halloween Decorations.”

Since blog posts shouldn’t be sales pitches, this business owner could write an article about creative Halloween Decorations for an adult Halloween party, a kids Halloween party or something else related to this phrase.

The goal would be to capture this traffic and then guide them to the Halloween Costume category of the shopping cart by providing a link to the category page from within the blog post.

Now, the business owner is capturing even more traffic without making a sales pitch!

With a little planning and creativity, blog posts can drive a lot more traffic to a website.

How will your next topic work to bring you traffic from new audiences? We’d like to know!

 

Related article

About Melanie Yunk (50 Articles)
Melanie Yunk, President, Roaring Pajamas Melanie Yunk started working as a social media and search engine optimization consultant early in 2009, when she founded Roaring Pajamas, a digital marketing agency in Northern California. Melanie is passionate about helping businesses market their products and services online. She brings more than 20 years of marketing, engineering and content experience to clients from various industries, including search engines, construction, retail, B2B, wholesale, heavy duty trucks, authors and more. Melanie previously founded Melanie's Fine Foods after purchasing Big Acres® Gourmet Sauces where she expanded the line to be distributed nationwide and in Canada. She also founded Yunk Consulting where she assisted software and semiconductor companies in implementing international standards for electronic databooks that she also helped developed while working at Intel Corporation. Her earliest career began at Honeywell Commercial Flight Systems where she worked on the Boeing 777 and MD11 cockpit projects. She continues to write on the Roaring Pajamas Blog and also as a guest blogger writing about all natural and gourmet foods. Melanie volunteers as a Board Member for the San Carlos Chamber of Commerce and former President of the Advisory Board for the Rosalie Rendu Center in East Palo Alto. She lives in San Carlos with her husband Kent and two Cornish Rex cats.