Case Study: How To Attract People To Your Site
Because there are so many different niches, markets, and demographics, there is no an exact science to find out what will attract people to come to your site; however, you can always try to list out some of your more popular pages and figure out what made these sites pop.
In this following list, we will be looking at some of the more popular articles throughout ASANT Media’s portfolio of sites, and try to figure out what exactly made these pages popular… (no specific order)
1. 4 Stocks To Buy In 2009 (TWI) – I can tell you right now that this is my most visited page throughout the entire ASANT Media network. Why? Because it is the first site on the first page of many different variations for the search term “4 stocks to buy in 2009″ on Google. This alone will get you hundreds of views a day.
Obviously as we are now in the latter half of 2009, so this search term is starting to die, but we can see how time relevant articles will boost your chances of being found in the search engine. Some future post could be “4 Stocks To Buy In Last Of 2009″. Find what people will be searching for, and go after that term. Check out 7 Effective Ways To Increase Your Search Traffic.
This article was also part of a contest with about 8 other sites, so that was 8 free quality link backs. While there is no real prize to the winner, we all win by linking to each other and boosting our link juice and traffic.
2.To Buy Or Sell (TWI) – This article was some how picked up and linked to by Reuters.com and StumbledUpon heavily. Although this site experienced tons of traffic, it was only for about a span of about a month. Unlike search engine traffic, that can be steady for a while, social network traffic is in and out. Yesterday’s hot story is today’s back page. The bounce rate on traffic from social networks is also much higher than search traffic ranking.
3. 4. 5. 8 Best Free iPhone Stock Trading Apps, 6 Best Free Stock Resources, 10 eBooks That Will Maximize Your Returns (Speak Stocks) – I’m pretty sure you can see what all 3 of these articles have in common just by the title… they all list a bunch of resources. When it comes to making great link bait articles (meaning people will link back to those articles) list are by far the easiest. It really does not take much know how or time. You can see that these titles also aim at some popular search terms people might look up, “best free iPhone stock trading apps”.
Interpreting This Research
So now that we know what some of the popular articles are what do we do with this new found knowledge? There are two things. First, replicate the article format. Come up with another topic related to your niche and follow the formula. If it works again, then you know you have a great resource on your hands now.
Second, use these popular articles to your advantage. If you are fortunate to still be receiving traffic to these articles (i.e. search traffic), then tweak the articles to highlight some of your other articles or projects. Seamlessly embed internal or external links you want to promote and that you think visitors should check out.
P.S. I used Google Analytics to research these traffic numbers.