Climbing the traffic ladder on the backs of the dead can give a news site a lasting boost in visitors. Some people don’t think thats proper, those people are sissies. They are forgetting its the same thing thats been happening for ages in print and most people ignore that.
Mainstream media has been profiting from the dead and unfortunate for years and you can to. Turn on Fox news and you will see a litany of the days dead even those of dubious news value. Look at the local paper and you are likely to see a bold headline of a murder somewhere on the frontage and possibly above the fold. How does mainstream media get away with exploiting these unfortunate situations and how does that relate to an internet marketer?
The key to successfully using these types of subjects is to have a value add component. Providing some sort of added value to the story exonerates the exploiter of the situation. For instance I have seen mainstream media provides tips on how to avoid being car jacked, what to do if your plane is hijacked, and other tips related to the the terrible situation being reported on. Tips like these are useless information for the average person. Surely you are more likely to be struck by lighting than having your plan hijacked? These tips are given to avoid appearing crass when reporting for shock value. Contrastingly a website is more capable of delivering useful services to its users related to a given tragic story. Providing those services to the users are a web marketers get out of jail free card.
Websites should leverage the fact they can be interactive to provide a useful related service. For instance some services that could be provided are providing a place to mourn online or to express outrage or to discuss how terrible a story was. These types of community services are what people need reading about a tragedy. They also benefit your site.
Case in point…
Last month right after the shootings at Virginia Tech I purchased a variety of keywords based on the the shooting.
The pages landed on a site that covers Virginia news and on a relevant story that allowed users to leave comments. I couldn’t even keep my account funded to with all the traffic that was coming in.
What was the end result of this?
- I doubled my percentage of returning visitors
- I doubled the amount of daily traffic for the site.
- Effectively purchased original content in the form of passionate user comments for a dollar a post, a tenth of what it would of cost me to pay a writer.
- I provided a place for people to vent and express their outrage to one another at a time when they most needed.
That was a win for everyone involved.
Don’t be a sissy promoting touchy topics.. just think it through.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Like it? Subscribe to the blog if you haven't already
Related Posts
-
Search Engine Land a little more than a year later..
Blackhat SEO Definitions
Porn Webmaster Forums
Google Ranking Changes
I have read they release a list of all hurricane names at the beginning of the year. You could purchase all of them as domain names and wait for one of them to strike.
If there is some sort of natural disaster, you can check the charitable donations micro-sites. They might have registered the .org version but not the .com version or they might register a hyphenated domain but not the non hyphenated domain. These sorts of things can drive a lot of type-in-traffic and inadvertent links.
Disaster websites can easily transition into profitable, bad credit, home loan, mortgage, insurance and various other legal pr health problem, focused affiliate websites if you aren’t afraid to take on a topic like that.