Razvigor :-): 01/01/2007

Sunday, January 28, 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.

1. The website should be appropriate for the purpose

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).

4. Follow the Situation Closely and React Accordingly

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.

This case remains important not only because it contributed to world promotion of the product in question (the article and the blog), but it contributed to raising the average visits level of the whole Macedonian blogosphere. If the Macedonian firms and institutions require business promotion over the internet, they must necessarily take into consideration the need for proactive web-marketing, and hire relevant experts.

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.

PS
If you like it, please digg this article ;-).

SEO for Blogs – Harder for Other Alphabets and Scripts

Blogger.com, Joomla and other popular contemporary content management systems (CMS) provide a feature that creates URLs for each article based on the words in the title, but this works only with Latin alphabets.

So for instance, if you have an article titled "10 Top Things", and instead of an URL based on its ID in the CMS database, such as

http://www.yoursite.org/show_article.php=23

you will get an URL such as

http://www.yoursite.org/2007/Jan/10-top-things.html

The article's URL is one of the most important elements to the search engines and the more keywords it contains, the higher the rank of the actual article. Unfortunately, this HTML dump technique is currently non-applicable to websites using scripts other than basic Latin, because the domain names are allowed to use only English Latin characters.

For instance, for an article written in Macedonian Cyrillic, with a title „Граѓаните имаат право на избор“ (Citizens have the right of choice) you would get a generic link such as

http://razvigormk.blogspot.com/2007/01/blog-post_16.html

because Blogger.com has no ability to include the words from the title into the URL.

One temporary solution would be to include a feature for transliteration, or converting the text written in other script into English Latin alphabet, and then using it in for the URL. For instance, the title of the above article would be "Gragjanite imaat pravo na izbor".

This SEO technique would at least help surfers who would search for Macedonian content but have no ability to write in Cyrillic at the moment, and would be especially helpful with search engines who do automatic conversion and cover both original Macedonian Cyrillic and English transliteration, such as Pogodok.