The title of this post really should be: “How to Use Popular Trends to Drive Targeted Traffic to Your Blog.” However, that title would only appeal to a select audience and I am looking for an edge. I have done my research so I know Edward Snowden, Ronda Rousey and Donald Trump are trending heavily online.
If I can incorporate these keywords into my post I can attract more traffic than if I just That said, I cannot just keyword stuff a page. The terms have to be relevant to Google and to real human readers. I have to come up with a concept that relates to my niche that also uses the trending keywords.
You see there is something that the SEO gurus forgot to tell you. Pure, brute, targeted or untargeted REAL traffic is one of the main factors when it comes to getting your blog posts and websites ranked in Google.
Craigslist Does Not Care About or Need SEO
Do you think Craigslist.org cares one bit about SEO? I doubt that it is even much of an after thought. Craigslist has millions of real visitors coming to its website daily. If you put up a beautifully written post, keyword optimized for the keywords: “Donald Trump endorsed by Edward Snowden” on your blog, then you put a similar post, but not nearly as well optimized on Craigslist, I guarantee you the post on Craigslist.org will outrank yours in a heartbeat.
Why? Is it because Craigslist webmasters pore over the latest articles from Searchengineland and Moz.com? No because Craigslist is one of the most popular websites in the world and is slammed with real eyeballs hitting their pages every day.
Craigslist has momentum, it has been around since the beginning of the Internet and has not changed its website design since.
What does Craigslist have that most websites do not have? Tons of real eyeballs hitting their website. Therefore Craigslist posts will be ranked higher than most other websites for the same keywords even if the post is not as good as the post on the lesser visited website.
Let’s take a look at the example of Pete Cashmore’s Mashable. Mashable is one of the most successful websites on the planet and is bringing in millions of dollars in revenue each year.
Have you taken a look at the posts on Mashable? The posts are very light on content. Most are rather shallow fluffy posts without much depth. “5 Ways to do this, 3 ways to get better whatevers…. etc.” The posts are usually pretty short as well.
I bet Site Pro News would not even post many of the articles that are posted on Mashable if they were sent in by some unknown blogger. The articles would be sent back and Site Pro would say “please give us some better content.”
So why is Mashable such a great success? Because Pete Cashmore has a 5th degree black belt in spotting and capitalizing on trends en masse.
Mashable scours the Internet for trending stories and then re-writes the stories in a brief format and posts them on its blog. The site does this over and over and over and over. Imagine if you had 40 writers just looking for popular trends then re-writing the stories and posting them to your blog every day all year. The sheer momentum would start to push your blog to being one of the most popular blogs online.
I say that quality does not matter. Of course quality matters and there is a minimum quality that is needed. However, pure traffic and momentum are bigger factors than the subjective quality of an article when it comes to getting ranked in Google.
Mashable started off as a tech blog. Pete Cashmore was obsessed with getting traffic to his blog so, of course, he started looking at what was trending.
Much to his surprise, and maybe his chagrin, he found there were other topics that were easier to write about and got a lot more attention than posts about the nitty gritty details of social media. Cat videos, Kim Kardashian, football, politics and gossip are examples of some popular traffic baiting topics.
He then began expanding his tech blog to other areas to respond to the demand that he found. If you ever feel like getting depressed, check out what is trending on Google Trends. It is amazing what our collective consciousness is seeking out.
Cashmore is so obsessed with capitalizing on trends, he has invented a product that can predict future trends. It is not enough to regurgitate trending news but, according to Cashmore, you need to be able to predict the future to succeed.
So How Do YOU Take Advantage of Hot Trends to Boost Traffic to Your Website?
Use a tool called the Blog Social Analyzer. This tool will take the RSS feed for any blog and tell you which posts have the most shares on social media. With Mashable, you get a double whammy. First of all you know Cashmore’s philosophy is to capitalize on trends so he is only going after what is hot. But on top of this, you can see the “hottest of the hottest posts.” This is what you see when you type in Mashable’s feed for its business category blog into Blog Social Media Analyzer at the writing of this post:
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