Traffic

Isn’t it great when you get a traffic spike? 🙂

The image above shows a spike I recently received. I credit the increase in traffic to blogging about an important future event in my niche.

In this post, I’ll tell you specifically what I did. Also, I’ll give examples from other niches to help you understand the principles behind my strategy. Finally, I’ll share a way to take the strategy to another level.

Defining an Event

First of all, let’s look at what constitutes an event. An event is anything on the calendar where you can expect many people in your industry to be a specific topic.

My blog is in the trading card game niche. Every 3-4 months we get a new product, which gets players excited and causes them to go online for information about the product.

Every product is associated with a tournament a week before the official release date of the product. Joining the tournament is the only way you can own the product before it’s actually released. As you can imagine, many people take advantage of this opportunity.

With a little bit of thought, you can define events in your niche. Here are two examples from other niches.

If you have a NFL betting blog, the first week of the NFL season is always a big event because gamblers are excited about trying to win money. Therefore, there will be a huge spike of traffic for keywords related to the this event.

If you have a gardening blog, you had a great opportunity a couple days ago. Fall season just started so there was a spike in traffic for keywords related to fall gardening.

Setting Up Your Landing Page

Since you can predict events in your niche, you can create a landing page that targets those events.

Two weeks before the tournament, I set up a page on my blog that gave strategy tips for doing well in the tournament. I used relevant keywords for my title tag and headline.

I placed a link to the page on my header so every other page on my site linked to it. I used relevant anchor text for the link. This internal linking tactic builds link equity for the page and tells Google you consider that page to be very important.

Why create the page two weeks early? This time period gives Google time to index and rank the page. Google doesn’t work instantaneously. It needs time for its bots to spider your site and find new pages.

Let’s go back to our other two examples. An NFL gambling blogger could set up a page entitled “Betting Picks: NFL Week One Games”. The gardening blogger could create a page entitled “Fall Gardening Guide: Fall Plants and Flowers”.

My recommendation is setting up a page rather than a blog post. If you have a blog post as your landing page, it will look old by the time the event comes around blog posts show the date of publication whereas a page doesn’t. Of course, you do want to create a blog post to tell your readers about the page right before the event.

Also, the page can be a place to add links to relevant blog posts. For example, with the fall gardening page, the blogger could update it with a link and short summary whenever she creates a new post about fall gardening. This keeps the landing page updated with fresh content.

Change in Mindset

I had to change my mindset to implement this strategy.

I got into blogging because it allows you to cover the latest information about your niche. I’m used to giving my thoughts about events that just happened.  Also, I like to blog about what is current, so it was hard for me to blog about something in the future.  But now that I’ve seen the results of a little planning and preparation, I’ll be aiming for more future events.

With this strategy, you’ll have to prepare and plan ahead. Your landing page won’t get much traffic in the beginning. But your preparation will be pay off as the event arrives and your page ranks well on the search engines.

Performancing offers link building services to promote your event landing pages.