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October 17th 200617/10/2006 - 10/17/2006 |
The idea came in to my head after listening to the Simon Mayo show on BBC Radio 5Live last week. I was on my way to school to pick ****** up when I switched the radio on, it must have been about 10 past 3 in the afternoon, not really sure what day of the week it was or even which week, put it was probably the 1st week of October 2006. I came in half way through the article so didn't catch it all, and didn't catch the name of the person being interviewed. I'm not even 100% sure I have the date right or even know what I am doing, but the general gist was that somebody was trying to organise a specific day where people would sit down and write. I believe the idea was that bloggers would write on this date, which I believe is today (17th October 2006), and save their writing, then in the future people would look back at this day in history and see what people were writing about at the time.
So why am I writing and what am I writing about?
Never one to miss an opportunity I decided to piggyback on the idea to demonstratre viral marketing techniques, online marketing and search engine optimisation. As soon as I heard the program an idea came in to my mind - Throw a template page online and optimise it for the search phrase strong>October 17th 2006. I did this the day after hearing the program and then used my network to create rellevant anchor text links back to the page and then sat back and waited. Sure enough 3 days later a google.co.uk (pages from UK) search for October 17th bought this page up number 1 out of over 4 million. With the template page in position the next thing was to hope whoever had come up with the initial idea was spreading the news about it. I kept an eye out in all the obvious places, but unfortunately saw nothing more about it. Ah well I thought, it's not another Hutton Inquiry or Queens Christmas message but I might as well keep to my original plan and just sit and write a load of nonsense for 30 minutes non stop. As anyone who reads this will have gathered, I'm not a great writer, my spelling sucks and punctuation is not exactly a strong point either ;o) But a lot of this is down to the fact I am writing the first thing that comes in to my mind and not correcting anything.
Back to the Search engine optimisation and marketing.
I've been optimising sites as a hobby for about 5 years now, 3 years ago I started making a bit of pocket money out of it and 18 months ago I gave up work to concentrate on it full time. It was about 18 months to 2 years ago that I first had my idea about piggybacking on news events, my first big one was The Hutton Enquiry. It was ideal because it was one of those big news stories when the date for it was already set.
The first thing I did was sign up for a new Pay as you Go account with an ISP (Freeserve), the reason I did this was because it gave you free webspace ;o).
Next I loaded about 10 pages up all interlinked and all designed to op[timise the landing page for the term "The Hutton Enquiry", next thing I did was sign up to another pay as you go account with freeserve, and this time set up a site for "The Hutton Inquiry" being a bit lazy I just used virtualy the same content for each site. I set up some links to the pages and then waited to see which would be the strongest. After about a week it appeared obvious that the easiest to rank high for would be The Hutton Enquiry (with an E), so I then turned most of my attention to that site.
With a couple of weeks before the release of the report my page was in the top 5 at Google and traffic was starting to come through, nothng great
about 20 or 30 visitors a day initialy, but this started climbing later in the week. I did a bit more on-site and off-site optimising and with a week before the reports releas was up in the top 3. Traffic was now up to the 50s or 60s a day but rising every day. 3 days before the release date traffic was in the low hundreds and it was then that I had a cunning plan. The day before the release saw a big jump in traffic to over 500 visitors and then the day came. I was still working full time then, but was fortunately working in the village where I live. I got up early and my stats already showed that this was going to be a big day. (for me at the time anyway) I decided to wait until after the report had been released before setiing my plan in motion, so got in from work at 12:00 and switched the radio on, as things were being announced I put them live on my page. The thing is though I was giving them a bit of a twist ;o) I put up some headlines like "Blair set to resign" "Frost blamed for leaks" "Government to take control of BBC" "BBC to be nationalised" "Campbell out of the soup" "Campbell named as new DG of BBC" etc. I never got to find out just how many people were slightly taken in, but did get 3 or 4 emails saying how juvenile I was. By the end of the day I checked my stats and saw I had well in excess of 2000 visitor in the day (which was really exciting for me at the time)
Mt next big News story piggback was the Queens Christmas Speech.
I again set up a template page with the intention of ranking it high and then on the day putting a spoof version up. As I was doing it though, I realised it was actualy a good idea. I then decided to hunt down previous sppeches from years gone by and create a new page for each year. My next decision was to make it AAA accessible to Bobby Standards and also translate the speeches in to 4 different languages; German, French, Spanish and Italian. I cheated doing this by simply using the google translation tool, but it did what I wanted it to do. I got some of my old SEO friends involved and also an old dead beat Chap who writes graffiti on nice bits of stone and they helped by setting me some links up.
3 weeks befor Christmas the page was top ranked for Queens Christmas Speech, Queen's Christmas Speech, Queens Christmas Message and various other things. It was then that I noticed a few visitors coming from the BBC Search engine and was pleased to see I was BBC recommended This was the final decider to keep the pages serious and not put a spoof one up. I decided to try and get the speech as soon as possible and see if i could get it loaded before she had made it. I had all my planning done, so then after opening our presents on Christmas Day. logged on and went searching around some New Zealand news websites. sure enough, I found a transcript of it by mid morning, soon edited it and had it live on my page before 11:00 I then switched off and enjoyed the rest of Christmas Day. Later that night I logged back on and checked my stats, over 4000 visitors
More later tonight............