Blogging Tips

Using the news to drive traffic to your website or blog is one of the easiest ways to increase web sales. With web tools like Google Trends and Yahoo News, it’s easy to determine what’s hot in the news. So, how do you use these tools to drive traffic to your website or blog?

Follow these three steps.

3 Steps to Take to Use the News to Drive Web Traffic and Increase Sales

1. Determine What’s Hot: This is so easy. For example, if Google is your search engine of choice, simply go to Google.com/trends. If you click on “More Hot Trends” when you get to this page, you will see a list of the top 100 most recently searched phrases on Google.

It’s updated often. For example, under the date on this page, it may say, “Updated 26 minutes ago.”

Choose any keyword phrase that interests you, you know about and/or is in your niche.

2. Make it Relevant: Once you choose a keyword phrase, make it relevant to your niche. For example, if you operate a credit repair website, the search term “daveramsey.com” would be an excellent phrase to write a post on.

FYI, Dave Ramsey is a talk show host, author and television personality. All of his endeavors have to do with getting out – and staying out – of debt. When I was writing this missive at 9:22 pm U.S. EST last night, “daveramsey.com” was the search term in the #10 spot.

Tip: Try to choose keyword phrases that are in the Top 20 spots to drive the most traffic.

If you don’t find a keyword phrase that is relevant, make it relevant. For example, for my niche of freelance writing, I could easily write an article on how to get out of debt on a freelance salary (which I’ve done by the way). Working in the keyword phrase daveramsey.com would not be hard at all.

It’s easy to make what’s topical relevant to your niche if you think about the totality of your target market’s lives, not just what you want to sell them.

3. Post to Article Directories: Once you write a piece, write two versions of it. Why two? One to post to your site and the other to distribute to free article directories.

You always want what you post only original material to your site. This should be the most in-depth piece. The second version should be a shorter, briefer version. In the resource box of this article (which, remember, is going to be posted to free article directories), you can link to the more in-depth piece on your site/blog.

Using the news to drive traffic to your site is easy because you already know what people are searching for. Making it relevant to your niche will not only make your site more interesting and valuable to readers, it will build trust.

And, trust leads to sales, which is what operating a web business – or any business for that matter – is all about.