So Halloween is now over. And with it a curious phenomenon. Asking around it appeared the number of trick-or-treat’ers were down this year. It wasn’t just a few people who noticed it either.
So why could that be? Theories were that with it being on a weekend, people had time to organize parties and go outside their neighborhoods to trick-or-treat. Also with haunted houses open, many kids went there instead.
And that got me thinking about how the day of the week plays such an impact in Halloween results. And how does that impact your online marketing? And what other small nuances have a similar big effect?
So I went back to my blog and analyzed the results so far. Here are some takeaways you might be able to use to boost your business marketing results.
- Most often your home page is the most visited page on your site. Mine came in at 60.1% of the traffic. Also by commenting on a high traffic blog site’s post and linking back to your own can significantly boost traffic. In this example I nearly doubled my traffic for a week just from one comment.
- Best of or Ultimate List post. Particularly if you pull in other high profile marketers with huge followings (and tweet out to them so they know you posted about them). You can leverage off of their goodwill. My 2nd highest visited page is 6.5% of traffic (notice significantly lower than my home page).
- Posting about someone else who is in the news or entertainment but isn’t so big that they are already mentioned a lot online. In this case I blogged about Alan Connealy, a participant on “The American Ninja Warrior” reality TV show. By posting about his various businesses and the TV show, I got a lot of traffic from that mention. In this case it was my 3rd highest visited page at 1.7%.
- People love surveys…and Facebook. In this test I posted a business survey and boosted the post on Facebook. This got my largest Facebook likes and was my #8 most popular post. This can be even more effective when you partner up with someone else or several people with a big list and jointly post it/market it.
- When it is in the news and controversial, it is awesome. I spent a lot of time following the Republican debates and Donald Trump in particular. A character that is definitely polarizing (helpful in generating buzz). He came in at #6. This particular post was focused on the 1st Republican Debate on Fox News that broke records for that telecast. Similar posts also did well. Or tying in a couple of candidates who were both in the news carried extra juice.
- Days of the week and the time of day you post all matter – not just for when to post but also when gets the most retweets, shares or likes on the big three social media sites (Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook). You can check out a few of the guidelines here to get better results.
- Interviews. They give you extra credibility – whether you’re being interviewed or you’re interviewing someone else. If you can’t do a video interview, consider an audio one that can go on a blog. Or transcribe the interview later and make it a blog post. Here’s an example of one I did recently to give you an idea of what it could look like.
So which of these ideas are you going to try first with your blog posts? What other ideas do you have you’d like to share in the comments below? As a community of like minded marketers, I look forward to hearing some of your ideas. As usual, tweets, shares and likes are always appreciated.
