Case Studies
Thursday, August 23, 2007
How to Get Over 10000 Visits to a Webpage in a Day (Case Study)
In the night between December 4 and 5, 2006, in the twelve hours between 7 pm and 7 am, one article of the Science Fiction Observer blog received over ten thousand visits. The lessons of this success are useful to all interested in online marketing and promotion.
This blog was opened for the reasons of testing the new Blogger software, learning about social networking as promotion tool through practice, and--of course--to present news and opinions about science fiction and related subjects, by the blog members.
Blogs are good tool for web marketing and e-publishing experiments because the initial financial expenses are minimal, while the very nature of the medium enables quick linking among the sites, which are already optimized for search engines (if they use Latin alphabets). Large portion of their audience consists of other bloggers, who by default surf more than the usual internet users, so the results are obtained quicker, in comparison to the overall internet-space.
2. Present Relevant Information
During the previous weekend I came across a news item that I found fitting into the concept of the blog, and could be tied in to some previous posts. In the presented form it did not provide complete information. The topic was updating the legal framework on copyright in the U.S.A. in some special cases, enabling access to abandonware, including some old DOS games mentioned on the blog. Besides a link to the news, I also found the original text of the new regulation and posted a link to it, alongside with a quote of the most important article. By this I provided a complete information, enabling further research for the readers who would like to pursue it.
3. Invest in Promotion over the Internet
Few days before that I already promoted the basic website of the blog over the StumbleUpon, generating over 1000 visits. I decided to use Digg's Gaming News channel for this article, because its readers would be most interested. The platforms both social networking services, but Digg's advantage is that it's completely web-based, while StumbleUpon requires users to install toolbar. (StumbleUpon's advantage is the ability to initiate direct communication among users, which is somewhat complicated on Digg). Digg articles receiving enough votes appear on the extremely popular front page.
This happened with the article in question. After getting initial support by dozens of voters, the visits skyrocketed to a few hundred. It ended its stay on the front page with over 1440 diggs, leading to over 14.000 visits from all over the world in the next couple of days. Links on other websites and blogs continued to supplement the Digg effect. Most of the visitors came from locations where potential foreign investors reside (North America, Western Europe, East Asia, Australia).
During the evening, I stayed on the particular Digg page used for voting, responding to comments by other users. This also helped the promotion, because their friends can see if they are active and post comments to certain topics, and get curious about it. Also, I invited my friends who were online at the time to join the party via IM.
In this case, the financial investment was minimal, and most of the investment consisted in applying experience and knowledge of operation of systems used.
5. Analyze and Make Room for Further Development
According to the results by the blog aggregator Digimak, which uses the data from the public counters of around 88 Macedonian blogs, an average Macedonian blog has about 40 unique visits per day. The most popular Macedonian blogs seldom top 200 visits per day, with the exception of porn blogs, which remain a separate world anyway. Judging by the available public counters and some insider data, Macedonian business-oriented websites probably do not stray much from this pattern.
Source: Како до над 10.000 посети на ваша веб-страница во еден ден (студија на случај). Filip Stojanovski for Razvigor in Macedonian blog, Jan 15, 2007.
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Google AdSense Case Study
PVRBlog.com found a way to cover costs and make a profit with Google AdSense.
Case study : PVRBlog.com : www.pvrblog.com
PVRBlog
It's fair to say that Matt Haughey doesn't always start with a business plan. Based in San Francisco, Haughey has been a website developer, designer, and publisher for years, and is an active blogger as well. One of his blog sites, PVRBlog.com, is all about personal video recorders (PVRs), especially the TiVo® brand. Nearly a year ago Haughey began posting messages about this growing consumer electronics category, including notes on TiVo features, shortcuts, new models, reviews, hacks, and PVR industry news.
"I encourage people who can write and have active blogs dedicated to a single subject to support them through AdSense ads. It's definitely lucrative, and you can concentrate on your subject and your site."
Matt Haughey
Founder, PVRBlog.com
Challenge
Haughey didn't intend for PVRBlog to become a business. But its popularity grew - up to 5,000 people read it every day - and he wondered if there was a way to cover costs for hosting and storage. "If running ads could pay for the site, that would be fantastic," he recalls thinking. But as rule, Haughey and his blogging circle did not like the often irrelevant, obtrusive nature of most online advertising. "I didn't have a clue about how to find decent advertising for the site," he says. Haughey read about the Google AdSense™ program and decided to try it. "It's completely automated, and so it took 5 minutes to set up," he says. "I've hardly touched it since then."
Results
"I can't believe how lucrative AdSense is," Haughey says. "On the very first day it was on, I made twice what it costs me for monthly hosting, storage, and bandwidth overage fees," adding that he's making money because the ads are relevant and readable. "The targeting is perfect for me," he says. Since PVRBlog is about a product, he gets a lot of traffic from searchers. "People are constantly looking for TiVo and PVR products and services. I'm lucky to have a blog that is product focused, because the ads all relate to PVR products and services."
Haughey says the custom color feature to differentiate the ads from the pages is "awesome. It's nice to add color so readers can see them in context on the page."
In his professional role as web creator, Haughey says he now sees the value of AdSense for similar endeavors. "I encourage people who can write and have active blogs dedicated to a single subject to support them through AdSense ads," he says. "It's definitely lucrative, and you can concentrate on your subject and your site." In particular, he feels the program is "really great for bloggers who worry about the wrong kind of commercialism creeping in, because AdSense ads really work in the context of blog pages."
Since launching AdSense on PVRBlog, Haughey has even opted to run AdSense ads on Metafilter, a much larger community blog site he began in 1999. Today, it features half a million posts on some 27,000 subjects. In short, Haughey has become an extreme fan of Google advertising, which he now says "changed everything by offering highly targeted ads that are actually useful."
About Google AdSense
Google AdSense is a program enabling online businesses to earn revenue from serving ads precisely targeted to specific web content and search pages. A broad universe of sites profit from AdSense, with service levels ranging from online sign-up to dedicated support management. Google's thousands of advertisers also benefit from AdSense by gaining exposure on sites across the Google Network, including AOL, Ask.com, Lycos, and EarthLink. Visit www.google.com/adsense.
Posted by gzleus 6:00 PM
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