The Blogger’s Calendar
I’ve recently found myself thinking more seasonally / time sensitively in relation to blog posts. Regardless of whether you are a tech blogger or a personal one, taking note of what is going on around you is super important to aid your traffic growth. You can ride on waves of traffic relevant to the particular event or time of the year if you get it right. I’ve already seen this happen for a few things this year, with many bloggers getting traffic over the furore that was picturegate. Interestingly enough the top Google result for this relates to a Twitter search for the hashtag – as this was a story that broke on Twitter and was micro-blogged at length. To get a feel for new breaking material on the story, many bloggers chose to adopt the hashtag in their posts, thus pushing the term to the top of the serps.
Yesterday, my April Fool’s Day post was ranked highly in the search engines for that term, weighing in at number 2 behind some of the other major blogs such as TechCrunch. Both myself and Arrington were posting early that morning – around 7.00 for me. Previous to that, I was one of the first people on the web to blog (albeit quickly) on Yahoo Sideline – bottom line breaking / relevant / time sensitive news brings traffic.
How come?
Something that I’ve noticed is that Google artificially inflates breaking news stories, or certain keywords if they gain enough traction in the blogosphere, or elsewhere around the web. This basically means that stories that are as young as 30 minutes old, can find their way to the first page of the results, without having any backlinks, or Google pagerank related to the term. The quicker you can break a story via your blog, or be the first to blog around a term that later gains interest on the web, the more likely you are to rank 1st for it on the day the story breaks.
This is Common sense journalism, i.e. the newspaper to get the scoop, gets more readers on that day. The same law exists online.
This sub algorithm that goes on behind the scenes at Google keeps them relevant for breaking news – which is exactly what they want. People turn to Google in times of crisis, to find out what a story is about, and who has covered it.
The Bloggers Calendar
Anyway, to aid in predicting when and what to post on, I’ve done a quick trawl around the web including Wikipedia and Google’s holiday logos page to find out some of the events that will be taking place the rest of this year. The key is to work out what is going to be happening tommorow as opposed to live blogging it – that way you are one up on the crowd, and can potentially have a blog post or a piece of link bait ready to go before it happens. The added bonus of Google’s holiday logos, are that many people click on them when they are released, so for example if you’ve posted on something like Alexander Graham Bell – and Google draw a holiday logo – badabing major traffic.
I’ve compiled each one of the dates into an easy to use calendar format that you can check back on. The calendar skips automagically to the current day so you can see if there is a major event that you can either post directly about or theme within your site. You can also navigate between months etc.
The benefits of this are multiple – One it provides you with new and fresh ideas for traffic, and two it gives you a shot at either hitting on some holiday traffic, or being the first to break a story. If you get into the mindset of seeing what events are approaching, this makes your life as a blogger much easier.
You can find the bloggers calendar over here, I’ll be adding events to it as I discover them for the remainder of the year, and may spend some time updating this for 2010 as well. If you think I’ve missed something significant let me know in the comments and I’ll add it in.
You might also enjoy..
Filed in: Blogging
About the Author (Author Profile)
Paul is a regular 28 year old web bloke / programmer with a penchant for online marketing. This blog is a personal outlet, with an eclectic mix of articles.Subscribe
If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to receive more just like it.
Hmm… a few little bugs to iron out of that calendar… check out June 4th, for instance – Independence Day a whole month early… isn’t that a little too pre-emptive?
Oops,
Everything in this is database driven, so I’ve entered it in wrong. Thanks for pointing that out Francis,
Paul.
I tend to shy away from blogging about national days, holidays etc… maybe I should rethink this one. Had thought of a few April Fool blogs, but diacarded them, in favour of normal stuff.
Thanks for prompting more thought, yet again…
Hi Dawn,
I think if you can integrate it seamlessly, you should do so. For example blog titles that tie the event together with your chosen niche work well. e.g.
“an seo guide to the olympics” – thinking outside the box a bit..was what I’m getting at.
Paul.