How to Game Real World Events to Increase Your Websites Traffic
	By Kevin Fleming | February 20, 2008

I have always been intrigued by internet trends and I constantly find myself checking Google Trends. From sites that measure internet traffic like Google Trends and Technorati you can see that internet traffic is actually very dynamic. Visitor trends are constantly changing depending on real world events and what you see on the news.

I decided to set up a case study a few weeks ago that would explore if it was possible to easily game these trends and real world events to bring more traffic to your website.

I decided to set the experiment up on a website that covers Satellite TV related news and information. I’m a big fan of the TV show Lost, and the premiere of Season 4 was in about a week so I thought that this might be the prefect opportunity to see just much traffic gaming real world events could bring me.

After I picked my event (Lost Season 4 Premiering), I wrote an article about the “Top 5 Places to Watch Lost Online”. This article was basically just a list of places on the internet where you can catch up on Lost if you missed any of the last three seasons. There was really nothing too special about the article, however I made sure to include keywords like “Lost Streaming Online” and “Watch Lost Online”. These were keywords that I suspected would get searched for more once the new Season of Lost Premiered. Now I just had to wait about a week until the premier aired.

And Then it Happened….

As you can see from the graph above, when Lost premiered on the 28th of January my website traffic started to skyrocket.

The day after Lost Season 4 premiered I had 5 times more visitors than just two days earlier after writing just one article!

Almost all of this traffic was all coming in from Google Search. This more than quadrupled my sites traffic. I found these results astonishing, considering my website already receives a solid amount of daily traffic. I was really only anticipating a 25-50% increase in traffic, and that was if it even worked.

Below you can see the top 10 search phrases leading people to my site. Keywords relating to Lost completely overtook my most popular keyword which was Satellite TV, and now 9 of my top 10 keywords are Lost related.

After all of the excitement wore off the final question I had left to answer was really the most important one. Does the traffic continue or does it dissipate once the hype is over? Well the good news is that my site continues to receive a huge amount of traffic from Lost. You can see in the first graph that the traffic did drop off a bit but the site is still receiving more than 3 times as much traffic as it did before the experiment. My subscriber count continues to grow as well and has increased by about 30% since the beginning of the experiment.

This experiment could easily be repeated with any large real world event, such as upcoming sporting events, TV events (obviously), and really anything that makes headlines. I want to note however that I did this on a site that was already very established in Google, this may not work until you have a fair amount of authority.

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