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Tupac's alleged killer comes forward after more than 10 years. Now what?
People are hungry to find out the latest developments on big news stories and turn to Google, YouTube and social media to find it. If you can post a timely and interesting article, you will be sitting pretty to receive an enormous amount of traffic.
How do you find the hot topics people are talking about online and attract new visitors to your website?
John Chow recently shared a case study of how his own blog received nearly 20,000 views on a blog post he did about the motorcycle tv show, Choppers. He's a fan and did a writeup to test a theory he had and it worked! Now you may not always be watching a hit show and think, "I should blog this," but you can use freely available tools to find trending topics of interest and today I'll show you how.
I worked with a client today who requested a blog evaluation. I offer these via my technology training site, Freshworkshops.
As with most bloggers, Patricia was looking to get more visitors to her site. She's only seen a few hundred in the last six months and was feeling frustrated. She felt she had so much to offer yet the traffic just wasn't registering in her Google Analytics. She also wanted to be ready for a blogging conference she'd signed up for and what better thing to share than how well her blog was doing?
After going over my standard blog checklist, we talked about ideas and strategies for upcoming blog posts.
What's Being Searched For Online?
You do your site a disservice if you're not paying attention to what people are looking for. One of the easiest ways to score "blog gold" is to join the conversation on a big new story around a major world event.
This can be anything from celebrity deaths like Michael Jackson and J.D. Salinger (who wrote Catcher in the Rye) to political scandals like Anthony Weiner's schwang being all over the Internet and Norm Coleman's donor database showing up on Wikileaks to disasters such as plane crashes, tsunamis and earthquakes.
And let's not forget the assassination of Osama Bin Laden by US forces which gave Mashable, a site known for sharing the latest news about social media, its highest traffic day... EVER!
Mashable is an extremely popular site with an estimated 30 millions views per month. This makes it one of the most visited websites and blogs on the Internet but, as you can see, even they were able to benefit from talking about a major news event such as the death of Bin Laden. Now some found it in bad taste to do this. There's a great post by ParisLemon called, On Bin Laden Killing Tech Blogging which talks about sites such as Mashable completely leaving their core focus to game search keywords.
1. Google Trends
One of your first places to visit is Google Trends. You can see the actual search terms people are using plus do specific searches to find the volume over the last few days, weeks, months or years.
Stay ahead of the pack. This tool allows you to gauge which terms in the wild are building momentum and you may be able to write about something before others have a chance to if you can see a good connection.
2. Google News
An excellent place to look through news articles being published on major sites is Google News.
Crowdsource your story. Here we can see CBS News, the Washington Post, Slate, MTV, MSNBC and The Smoking Gun have all written articles. Here's where you will find additional details you can add to your article, create citations from and link back for potential link love. You can filter by specific sources too.
3. Google Realtime
Sometimes a news story is just so hot that you need to be watching social networks such as Twitter for play-by-play updates, links to photos and blog posts. That's where Google Realtime comes in. In addition to seeing a stream of Matrix-like updates, you can see the popularity of the keywords as well as top links.
Live in the moment. Sometimes the story will unfold before your very eyes, and you can capture the origional storytellers without having
