10 Tips for Writing on Current Events to Gain Traffic

Have you ever written an article that got you thousands of visitors on a single day?

If you haven’t already – it is time you get started.

Writing on current events, events that are going to happen from 3 to 5 days from now is one of the best ways to gain maximum traffic. Another thing here that we should consider is getting them ranked. So, always better to have a few weeks of preparations for writing your article and making sure they rank well on the given days of the event.

So, here in this article, we are going to discuss some of the tips that will help you make the most out of any given event.

1) Check for festivals world wide – Given the size of the world and the people in it, you will find a festival for every given day. Surely, it is impossible to cover every festival out there, but if you target well, you can find some festivals that are good with your niche, festivals that have good traffic or sales value and some with even less competition.

An example of a recent upcoming festival is Rakhi where brothers give Rakhi gifts to their sisters.

2) Check Google Trends – Anything that is being searched heavily on the Google Search engine hits the Google trends list. So, any upcoming festival or anything that has importance will be automatically be listed there. The entire list is available here – http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends – as you can see, this list is a global list. However, if you want to target a country, say India – change the google.com to google.co.in and keep the rest of the URL same, like this – http://www.google.co.in/trends/hottrends – and you will get results from those specific countries searches.

3) Check News – Internet always breaks news faster than the off line media. Check Google news or Yahoo news and you will see plenty of breaking news stories. If you can write on those then your traffic will surely explode. However, the trick here is to do it fast – very hard as there isn’t too much information as the news has just been broken, but if you can manage – this is one of the easiest way to get plenty of readers. And for those readers you will be the go-to destination for breaking news.

4) Check social media – At one time digg was one of those places on the net that used to break huge stories, however, facebook and twitter does it now. Checking trending hashtags on the social media is a good way to keep on top of things.

5) Get into the news – If you have a site that does this kind of a thing often, then getting yourself in Google or Yahoo news is certainly a good thing to do. That way, your site will be displayed alongside several other news sites which will increase your traffic immediately. Google news sends a lot of traffic to news websites, getting listed alone is enough to keep the traffic flowing.

6) Build up your pages – Festivals are not a onetime thing, next year they will come again. For best results, you should build up a page for every possible festival out there and try and rank for them. Build links and keep building them so that you can rank for them in the coming years if you miss this time.

7) Set Alerts – Google alerts is a good way to keep getting updates for anything that is posted on the web. Set an alert for a festival or something that you know is going to happen soon. As soon as that happen you will be notified by Google alerts. That will give you a head’s up and you can start working on it before others catch up.

8) Be ready – I don’t like this part myself, but I know some people do it – so will mention it here.

Be ready with an article for something that you are expecting, but don’t publish it, till that particular thing happens. Is there anyone famous and really old that is going to die soon. Perhaps he/she is really ill and everyone is expecting them to die. Are you expecting a team to lose the match, yes your prediction can go wrong and in that case just scrape that article – however, in the unlikely scenario that your prediction comes true – you can publish that article immediately after the match ends.

The possibilities in this point are endless – perhaps a new state or a country is formed, or say an earthquake happened. If you have a draft article ready – you can publish it with a slight bit of editing and you will be the first to have an article on that topic.

9) Make connections – Get connected with fellow news blog owners and when you break news, ask them to follow it up. That way, with the help of a few quick links from related news sites – your article will be on top of the news serps.

10) Social Media – News travels very fast on the social media and as someone who is working on delivering fast news – you should make the most out of the social media. Try facebook and twitter for sending news to your followers. Use hash tags to promote your news. Make connections with journalists and always retweet their news tweets. Make @ questions sometimes so that they remember you.

Online news has a huge audience and it is in the nature of humans to become the first to break or learn about anything. So, if you can become an authority that breaks news content first – you will surely gain a lot of subscribers and followers.

Google trends have cut down on the features from the past, but still it is one of those go-to places if you are looking for news stories to write on. Apart from Google, Yahoo also provides trends data. It is available on the yahoo.com homepage. This data is tailored country wise, so basically you can change the country code of the domain and find out more such trending keywords. Another such provider is Alexa.com where you can see which sites are moving up and down – this is found on the siteinfo tab of alexa.

My name is Khalid Shaikh and i am working at Rediff.com .

Rediff.com – India’s leading portal which covers India news, Hindi Movies, Photos, Videos, Live Cricket Score, Stock updates from BSE and NSE, Bollywood news, Online shopping, Social networking, Rediffmail NG.