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 I receive a lot of emails from people who ask whether, with all of the competition online, it’s still possible to enter a niche right now and make money. I won’t deny that it’s getting much, much harder in the affiliate marketing space (how I make money) but persistence, determination and creativity can take you anywhere.
Did you know that 20-25% of Google searches every single day are brand new? 1 in 4 search queries have never been typed in the history of the search engine – every single day. I knew of this statistic a few years ago but only recently did I try and leverage it. The result? In the third month after launching a new website, I received almost 1,000,000 unique visitors from Google.
My Results
I’m guessing the first thing you want to know is whether I’m just writing a sensational headline and have nothing of real value to share that you can apply to your own endeavours. Or, maybe you’re thinking I just got lucky and couldn’t replicate the same thing again? Sadly for the people who don’t read this blog, that’s not the case. This can be replicated, and I’m going to show you exactly how.
Before I do that, here’s the screenshot you’re probably looking for:
Sadly, I don’t see how I can prove the site was only 3 months old without revealing the domain. However, when I share how I generated this traffic I think you’ll have no reasons not to believe me, or any reason to doubt that you can do the same thing.
The exact keywords are going to be revealed in a short while, but first let me explain what it is that I’m doing. At its core, my strategy is so simple that you may want to put your head in your hands and wonder how you never thought about it before. That’s exactly what I did.
Thankfully, once I had this idea, I was able to leverage it for a nice monetary gain. I’m not going to hold back anything in this post because the opportunities from this tactic are so large and varied that there are opportunities for thousands of people to take advantage of this method.
How to Dominate Google in a Matter of Hours
Do you know how 1 in 4 Google search queries are unique each day? At first thought, it might not sound very realistic. Yet, the reason is simple: events. Think along the lines of natural disasters, sports results, holidays, reality TV results, new products and so on. Think about all of the news you can read in a newspaper today that is completely unique from anything that has ever happened in the history of the world.
Now you should be getting the idea.
In February, for one of my sites, I leveraged search terms for the sporting events and Valentines Day. Just look at some of the top referring keywords to one of my sites for that month:
- Vancouver 2010: 41,270
- Super bowl 2010: 32,836
- Olympics 2010: 6,216
- Valentines day ideas: 5,688
This is just a small sample of a report which contains thousands of different phrases.
What’s more; I don’t just leverage the tactic on this site, I leverage it on tens of websites and they are either making a lot of money or primed to make a lot of money when the event takes place.
I will go into detail on how I leverage Google to get traffic for these events but you first need to know how to find them.
Firstly, you can just know what events are going on right now or happening in the near future and use the following methods to get traffic for those. Or, you can use a tool like Google trends to look at the past and utilise that for the future. For example, I picked a totally random date from 2009 – August the 8th – and found these to be the most popular searches that day in the United States:
Imagine you could predict what someone was going to search for in the future. Well, you can.
If hundreds of thousands of people searched for UFC 101 results, then people are obviously going to be searching for future fights as well. What if you had websites in place for the next huge UFC match?
If someone wants to know the results for American Idol, what if you could be prepared to write content the minute the results are revealed?
It doesn’t have to be TV or sports, either. There are literally thousands of events every single day that people are searching for that nobody has looked for before. There’s no hidden secret to this method. That’s it.
Using Events to Get Traffic
Once you’ve focused on some events that you want to leverage Google for, there are a number of ways you can start to get traffic for them.
Build Minisites Around the Phrase
I have a World Cup website that is getting a few hundred visitors per day right now and there’s still another week to go (at the time of writing) until the 2010 Fifa World Cup begins. I actually live in Cape Town, where many of the games will be played, so I decided to build a site as a test based on all of the hype surrounding the event here.
When the competition starts, I’m probably going to get thousands of visitors per day landing on the website, simply because I picked a keyphrase that I knew (thanks to Google Trends) people would be searching for once the event kicked off. I picked up the exact .com for the phrase and rank no.1 in Google after nothing more than $10 directory submissions.
To say the SEO was easy is a massive understatement. The site only has 5 pages right now, but that’s all it takes (and this is just one example, of which I have many).
Get Featured in Google News
I discovered this tactic when working for one of the largest newspapers in the UK as their social media manager. They were in Google News, naturally, and one day received 8,000 visitors from Google for the term ‘Facebook’.
The reason why is simple: Google integrate news results highly on the page for that search query and my client just happened to write an article about Facebook that day. Of course, Facebook is one of the most popular search queries in the world – hence the large flood of traffic – but you can still get thousands of visitors by writing about a vast amount of topics.
For many events that take place, Google News is integrated highly in the search results. There are two ways to be included:
- Use a press release service like PRWeb which guarantees Google News inclusion for $80
- Create a site that is accepted into Google News (submit here)
I will be the first to say that for my personal projects, this is the option that I use the least. However, whenever I do test this tactic I always receive a ton of traffic to my sites because I make sure I’m covering a popular topic for that day.
Write Blog Posts on the Topic
The cost of paying to get into Google News can add up quickly and building a site just to get into Google News is going to take a lot of work. Fortunately for you and me, Google also integrate blog results in their search results for many event and date based queries.
You can start a blog for free, in minutes, so there’s no reason to think that the whole concept of this post is out of your reach. If you can write about topics as they’re happening and Google are already indexing your site frequently, you can receive a ton of traffic from this method.
Three things I’ve found to work well are:
- Putting the date in the post title. Not many people do this but surprisingly a lot of people search with it
- Making sure the date and time of the post going live are visible on your blog post
- Building a few links to the most important posts via bookmarkng sites (5 minutes of work) to give them a little more authority
If you get creative with this then you will likely see some incredible results.
Create Youtube Videos
I don’t really like to cover blackhat tactics on this blog, although I spent over a year doing some very shady things. I never took my tactics to the extreme and profited very little from them because I didn’t feel like my actions aligned with me personally. However, I still know about a lot of things that work and could make me money if I was desperate for cash.
One thing that you’ll find a number of dodgy characters on Youtube doing is creating videos for events before they even happen. You’ll see videos for movies that haven’t been released, clips from UFC fights that haven’t happened, and TV show results that are yet to be announced.
And as you probably guessed, not only are Google News and Google Blogsearch integrated into search results; Youtube videos are as well. If you can create the video in advance, increase the view and ratings count to give it some authority, then by the time the event goes live and people are searching for the video, yours is already ranking highly in the search results.
The version of this method I’ve just mentioned is highly unethical in my opinion (as the videos just tell people to go to a website) but thankfully, also the least effective.
The most effective use of this tactic is to actually upload the best videos you can, as and when an event is happening. When a search query becomes popular, Google also look at the most recent Youtube videos to display in their results, rather than just showing the ones that have been there for a while.
Monetising the Traffic
I’m behind web properties which receive millions of pageviews per month, yet some regularly make the same amount of money as my sites receiving tens of thousands of pageviews. While you need traffic to make money online, there are hundreds of different ways to monetise it. You would make a lot more money if 10,000 people landed on your site looking for a gadget to purchase – which you sold – rather than 50,000 untargeted visitors where your only hope is for them to click on an Adsense ad.
With this strategy, it’s really up to you how you want to use it. The very reason I don’t mind sharing it on the blog is because there are so many routes you can take to benefit from it.
The first option that most people think of is to build up a large amount of traffic and then monetise it via Adsense. Adsense can work well in a lot of cases but you can probably monetise the traffic better, depending on which phrases it is coming from.
Going back to the UFC example, do you think you would make more money through Adsense or:
- Selling fight tickets
- Offering relevant memorabilia
- Owning a UFC blog which people can subscribe to
- “Loaning” the traffic to UFC themed websites
- Selling ads slots to other UFC websites
I’m sure you get the idea. Again, if you can get creative with this, there’s a lot of easy traffic and money to be had. If you have any questions, there’s a guy named Glen who is more than happy to answer them in the comments.
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