Free Blog Method for Improving Blogging Traffic Scientifically
Free Blog Method for Improving Blogging Traffic Scientifically
Here’s a blogging method that may work for you, especially if you’re blogging on topics of a cyclical nature. This came out of an idea I had during a Student Loan Network meeting oddly enough having nothing to do with blogging.
Fire up Google’s AdWords Keyword tool. This is a free service to help you decide where to spend advertising dollars, but more importantly, it lets you see what’s hot, what’s popular, what’s related, and when. Let’s put in some popular social media terms - blogging, podcasting, social media, new media, and a few others.
Once the results come up, sort by Highest Volume Occurred In.
Scroll down until you find the current month. As I blog this, it’s July 2008, so let’s look at July.
You can see based on these results that the search terms listed, the keywords listed, are hot topics for the month of July. You’ll notice, for example, that this blog post is named after one of the hot terms, free blog, the hottest for July.
Don’t stop there. Head over to Google Trends and find that search term - free blog - then dial down to July 2007, the most recent period. Take a look at the chart.
This term - free blog - is most popular during the July 2007 period on Saturdays and Sundays, so if I wanted to maximize my returns, I’d probably blog either the night before or first thing in the morning on a weekend, since we’ve seen from past examples (like the lunar eclipse) that day of, early morning blogging can get you into search results for the day.
Repeat this for any of the popular terms that show up in the Adwords Keyword Tool, and suddenly you have a blog editorial calendar for the month of things people are actually looking for in your vertical. Of course, don’t let this stop you from blogging what you want to blog about, but use this as a way of ensuring you don’t miss out on obvious opportunities in your blogging efforts.
If you give this a try, please let me know how it works out for you!
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Great post. We already use this process (recently switched from using Wordtracker which is somewhat inaccurate at times) at my company but it’s great to have it laid out since I regularly have to explain how to do it. Maybe I’ll just point them here! :)
July 23rd, 2008 | #
Brilliant. This is useful in so many other ways, too. Thanks!
July 23rd, 2008 | #
This is an interesting strategy. I’m intrigued. I would love to hear more about how it works for you and anyone else who tries it.
July 23rd, 2008 | #
Hey Chris - terrific post. We’re a big customer of google’s and frankly have not been that impressed with the quality of data that TRENDS offers but I think it’s improving every week, and clearly is still early. I think we’d probably use DIGG, Techmeme, Technorati or other community-based data in addition to the search tools to get a handle on the pulse of stories. The technique is really smart tho - nice suggestions! -Megan
July 23rd, 2008 | #