An interesting post on sitepoint caught my eye - the post was about a member there, who’s blogged about how a post written about the Johnathan Ross/Russell Brand Non News Fiasco was receiving huge traffic because the post is located on page 1 of google, surrounded by the likes of Youtube & Newspaper Stories.
News based traffic is great to get, however, the top spots are usually monopolised by the big sites. The only way to get there is to predict the story before it happens.
Surprisingly, it’s not the hardest thing to do.
Events
The easiest thing to do is to look at the events calendar for sports, awards ceremonies & big music gigs. Who are the big performers at these events? Are they training yet? Maybe write a post about it, that way, should they have a good run in the sporting event/controversial gig you are already established.
Why not give a guide to the rules of an unusual sport in the Olympics? Or maybe a post on how training is going for an athlete? Just be creative & original.
The Russel Brand/Johnathan Ross Prank (Or, being in The Right Place, at The Right Time)
To the above story, it took three weeks from the show airing to the scandal that brewed in the last week or so. So, using careful judgement, you may be able to pre-empt controversy. Of course, this is incredibly tricky to do, so I wouldn’t worry so much about it.
SEO, SEO, SEO!
Yes, those three letters again. However, with both the tactics mentioned above, you will only manage to target specific phrases, rather than general phrases, so work at being high for one phrase, then concentrate on the next.
My advice wouldn’t be worrying to much about beating the big boys for newsworthy content, and concentrating on producing timeless content, but if you want to give it a go, those are my three tips for beating the large news agencies at their own game.
Any tips from you?
on Nov 11th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
Exactly. If you’re the first to report something Google will treat you as the original source. I wanted to predict the outcome of the presidential election but then was too lazy to do that. I would have been right
on Nov 12th, 2008 at 10:13 am
Funny you should mention that Tad Chef.
One thing I do a fair amount of is Squidooing. There was a report that one lens on there was heavily optimised for a keyword featuring Sarah Palin. All of a sudden, she hits the news as a Vice President Candidate, and her traffic goes from 10 a day to 2,000 a day.
So it can be done!