About a year ago I introduced a bit of a case study I was conducting for myself. I was trying some early attempts at GeoTargeting an article. My first attempt was publishing an info article on InfoBarrel on San Diego Memorial Day ideas. You can read more about this case study on the short post here on this blog that I published at that time: GeoTargeting Memorial Day Weekend.
At the time I hadn’t really dabbled much with regional keywords but rather general keywords. General keywords are those which are as applicable in Boise, ID as they are in Austin, TX. This article was really meant for a very specific audience, people looking for information on what to do in San Diego over this short weekend.
Had I really thought about it ahead of time I probably should have targeted a local event or happening that was year round but instead this experiment was not only local but also seasonal. This of course means it gets no page views during the rest of the year and only a little leading up to Memorial Day. Come to think of it I probably shouldn’t be wasting my time on it this time around anyway, but hey, why not do something fun for a change and see if I can learn something new.
Last year I published the Memorial Day article with little regard to how it would be monetized. In fact I had no idea if or how much money this article could make or if it would make any at all. As a result it didn’t really make much as you can see from my InfoBarrel earnings last March 2010.
This year I updated the first paragraph to reference 2011 rather than 2010 and I added a section near the top referencing San Diego’s Sea World as an option for celebrating that weekend. I decided to add a link to Hotels.com (CJ) in the section to see if I could generate any clicks and swing any random affiliate sales my way. This will be interesting to see how it goes.
Overall the article on Memorial day will need to be tweaked some more and I’d like to alter the links to Hotels.com to encourage more clicks but this will be a fun and interesting round two for this case study dating back to Spring 2010.
To embellish the case study even more I will be soon publishing a companion article to this Memorial Day article on IB which focuses more heavily on traveling to San Diego for Memorial Day. This will obviously make drawing clicks through to Hotels.com a bit easier… if I can get any page views to it that is. We’ll see how it goes and I’ll link to the second article when it goes live to be sure.
In 2010 I received 624 page views on this article in the month of May alone, this year we’ll see if I can increase that and see if I can get some eyes on a companion article more tailored to revenue. Cross your fingers for me.
Good luck, man! I'll be really interested to hear how this works out for you. I've been thinking about building up a small portfolio of holiday-themed articles that could be seasonally evergreen, if you take my meaning, and it sounds like this will be an interesting case study in that concept.
ReplyDeletenice. i want to see how it turns out.
ReplyDeletei've tried niche sites geared at specific Olympics.. once the games are over, the site is pretty much dead in the water.