One thing that draws BIG traffic is current news, trends and buzz.
The mainstream media is basically doing the work for you! All you have to do is create content about the topic, because people will definitely be searching for it online.
It's one of the easiest ways to write content that is good Link Bait (or "share bait"), and that has the potential to go viral.
So how do you find out "What's Hot?" I'll give you links & tips for getting the scoop, and some creative examples of ways you can tie these into your niche and content...
Finding Breaking News, Buzz and Current Trends
Here are just a few sites to get you started:
- http://www.google.com/trends/
- https://news.google.com
- http://theview.abc.go.com/hot_topics
- http://www.breakingnews.com
- http://youtube-trends.blogspot.com
- http://buzzlog.yahoo.com/overall/
Trending Topics on Twitter is a good resource as well. You'll find it in the sidebar of your Twitter account. (The screenshot above was taken 9/12/2012)
You can also do a search for niche or topic-specific news. If you have a site about Great Danes for example, Google "great dane news." If you have a site about beach vacations, Google "beach news" - and of course report on any major hurricanes or other natural disasters that affect beach areas.
Bookmark these resources, and any you find in your own topical research, and refer to them daily. Better yet, put them in your feed reader, so you can keep a closer eye on them! You never know when that one hot story is going to break that could bring you a flood of highly targeted web traffic. 😉
Getting The Most Traffic With "Hot Topics"
News and Trending Topics tend to get top priority in search results, and they often "trend" on social media sites like Twitter. Leveraging these stories gives you an advantage for mass exposure.
The first step is to make sure you properly optimize your blog post. Since keyword research tools give historical keyword data, and not current, you'll have to be intuitive and simply optimize for the main name or topic of the news/trend.
Google gives you great suggestions with the "related searches" line below the headlines on their Google Hot Searches page.
Your headline will be the most important element of your post, as it will dramatically affect your click-through rate. Crafting a funny, shocking, or thought provoking headline will result in the most traffic.
Be sure to hit Social Media as well, and on Twitter you'll want to use appropriate hashtags. Refer to the Trends block on Twitter and/or use the search box to locate relevant hashtags to use in your tweets.
Monetizing "Buzz" Traffic
Ideally you will use these Buzz posts to increase your readers and subscribers, but some hot topics are only good for short-term bursts of traffic. Consider the best ways you can monetize this particular traffic, and use a strong call-to-action in your post.
If it's a loose tie-in, and the traffic won't be targeted enough to convert your own offers, be sure to monetize these posts with Google Adsense.
Note: Adsense tends to get a higher CTR (click through rate) from search traffic than from your regular readers.
Getting Creative With The Buzz: What's Your Angle?
The key is to look for stories relevant to your niche, OR to come up with a creative tie-in that *makes* it relevant to your niche. As I mentioned above, a great headline is key. Having a good angle is what brings the viewers.
As I write this post, the story of "The Topless Photos of Kate Middleton" is being discussed everywhere across the web. Using Google Hot Searches I can see that the keyword phrases people are using (over a million so far) are: Kate Middleton, Kate Middleton photos, Kate Middleton topless photos, Kate Middleton Nude.
If you chose to use this particular headline story, your "angle" would depend on the topic of your blog - and your objective...
"Buzz Content" Ideas & Examples
Modern Parenthood, on CSmonitor.com, used the Kate Middleton story to tie in to teen sexting and they lead in to a parenting quiz:
Let's say I wanted to tie this story in to my low carb blog. Next, I Google "Kate Middleton diet" and guess what I find? She used the Dukan Diet, which has some similarities to Atkins & low carb - and would be a very easy tie-in for me on TravelingLowCarb.com (Kate was even traveling when these photos were taken!).
See how easy that was?
There is always news, and there will always be hot topics and trending stories. Consider how you can leverage those, and tie them in as relevant content on your blog. The mass media does the work for you - they get people interested and searching. All you have do to is create and optimize the content...
Get creative with it and have fun! 🙂
Best,
About Lynn Terry
Hi Lynn,
Awesome post with excellent example! I'm printing this and will refer to it often. Thanks! Also thanks for those links above. 🙂
I agree with the Adsense note you included .
What is the link to your low carb blog? I've not come across that one yet 😉
It's TravelingLowCarb.com 🙂
Great post, Lynn. This is an area I definitely need to work on. Personally, I couldn't care less about celebrities and people who are generally in the "spotlight", and I don't really keep up with current events/news. I never would have dreamed there would be a way to connect "the Kate photos" with your traveling low carb blog... now that's impressive! I LOVE how creative you are in most of what you do. Thanks for sharing.
Ditto - I don't keep up with them recreationally either. But for content and traffic, trending topics are a GREAT source. 😉
Here's the link to the post on my low carb blog, so you can see a live example of how I tied it in creatively: http://www.travelinglowcarb.com/3141/kate-middletons-diet/
🙂
Hi Lynn,
I love buzz content... digging that term. 🙂 I like to use video around a trending topic, which I upload to YouTube. I also embed the video into my blog post and that gets a nice sure of traffic.
I keep the video short (less than three minutes) and I enable monteziation via my YouTube video manager dashboard so the video displays AdSense banner in the video, in addition to making sure the blog post is ready for the traffic.
Great post.
Alan
Good tip, Alan! Adsense does particularly well below a video too, btw. 😉
Hi Lynn! Hope you had a nice weekend. Read your article about "Selling Online". Absolutely a site should be user friendly to customers who want to purchase items from you. You're analogy to Walmart-unorganized and no visible place to checkout was right on. Also, I get a feed error to my website debtrelief1.org/blog. It says what I need to do but don't know how to? Thank you Lynn.
Eric
Hi Eric,
You can get help with that on my forum at http://www.clicknewz.com/members/ The main section is free and open to the public, and we have some tech-savvy members there that can surely help you out with that. 😉 See you there!
I regularly get posts to the front page of Google about news in my industry. Thanks so much for the super resource links that will certainly help me broaden my reach. In fact, one of your examples gave me an idea for post right now.
Nice, glad to hear it! 😀
This is awesome and perfect timing! I'm just now feeling like I'm getting back 'into the game', getting my sites ready to rock and roll again! This is one of your priceless posts that definitely deserves to be a PDF.
Thank you Lisa. 😀
Here's an excellent tip I've been holding onto. It worked during the previous election season and it's working this time as well.
Political campaign phrases or phrases from political speeches that are under scrutiny in the media.
Good tip, Johanthan!
Awesome tips! See I learn something new from you EVERY DAY. I now have things to add to my blog planning list.
Awesome! 😀
This is a great post with some really good examples. I did this for a little while but have gotten busy and gotten away from it. Thanks for the reminder. I definitely need to start working on this again. Thank you so much for your tips! I really appreciate them!
Thank you Amanda. 🙂
I usually check Google Trends. I used to look at Yahoo's trends too, but I gave up, Google has better tools 😀
True - a variety of sources gives you some good ideas & angles though. 😉
So, what are your favorite sources? What do you check most often? You've mentioned several sources, but I doubt anyone would check all of them, it takes too much time.
I simply browse through the sources I linked to above. It's easiest if you put them in your feedreader so you can glance over all the headlines at once to get a feel for what's really trending. 😉
Topics that are modern, fresh and specially current issues that are in the news make it big because people like talking and discussing about issues that educate them and give them more information of that current matter. Hence, working on latest and topics currently in trend fetches the post more traffic.