Adventures in content material advertising | Profitable Software program

Again in 2011 I created eventcountdown.com. It had a snazzy downloadable, PerfectTablePlan-branded countdown clock for Home windows and web-based countdown clock with advertisements for PerfectTablePlan. Each free. The concept was individuals trying to find countdown clocks for occasions (akin to their marriage ceremony) would discover the positioning through Google, discover out about PerfectTablePlan and a sure share would then purchase my event seating planner software.

I paid different individuals to create the Home windows and internet variations of the countdown clock. The online-based clock was up to date once in a while so as to add pre-built countdowns for occasions like superbowl, the olympics, christmas, thanksgiving and so forth. And I fielded the occasional help emails associated to the Home windows countdown clock.

That is the full site visitors to the positioning from 2011 to 2023:

The peaks are principally attributable to superbowl. The positioning bought 38k hits in a single day simply earlier than superbowl 2019! The free Home windows countdown clock additionally drew various site visitors. In complete the positioning bought some 1.7 million web page views over 12 years. Solely a small share of those guests clicked via to PerfectTablePlan.com, however nonetheless a helpful quantity. Maybe some individuals have been additionally prompted to analyze PerfectTablePlan by the branding on the downloadable clock. The positioning may need additionally had some search engine marketing advantages for PerfectTablePlan.com. Who is aware of.

The eventcountdown.com web site is now gone (the area redirects to PerfectTablePlan.com). It didn’t appear definitely worth the effort to maintain including occasions to the online countdown clock with the site visitors now so low. Additionally each the web site and home windows clock have been trying dated. However I feel it was a worthwhile funding of my money and time.

I’ve additionally created numerous different contents pages and mini-sites over time: articles on desk planning, font collections, free clipart, place card templates and so forth. You possibly can see comparable trajectories for a few of these.

The site visitors appears to succeed in a peak after 3-7 years after which slowly decay away. Though I’ve proven them with the identical vertical scale right here, some generated much more site visitors than others.

I did some primary on-page search engine marketing for these content material pages. For instance, taking a look at Adwords key phrase information to decide on the web page title and H1. However nothing past that. No paid promotion or backlink constructing campaigns.

I attempted paying individuals to jot down articles associated to occasions. However none of those ever generated any worthwhile site visitors. Google may by some means scent the insincerity.

For my data cleaning software product I’ve been concentrating on ‘tips on how to’ pages and supporting movies aimed toward particular subjects. These are meant to each assist present clients and to draw new site visitors. For instance, how to clean data. I’ve additionally been posting these movies on the Easy Data Transform YouTube channel. The numbers of hits month-to-month on the Youtube movies are comparatively low, however they’re fairly focused and hopefully might be producing site visitors for years to return.

So content material advertising take-aways based mostly on my expertise are:

• Free content material is usually a helpful approach to deliver free site visitors to your web site.

• The quantity of site visitors you get is sort of hit or miss. Some content material has generated much more site visitors than anticipated, some lots much less.

• The content material must be effectively focused if you wish to have any likelihood of changing it to gross sales.

• Google will develop bored of it will definitely. You would possibly be capable to improve the longevity by updating the content material. I’ve not been very diligent with this, however even uncared for content material pages can generate helpful site visitors over 10+ 12 months lifespan.