I started a blog/website in January, 2013 and got a lousy 30 visitors for the whole month. By December, 2013 this had increased to 23,091. I will tell you what I’ve learned below.
The topic of the site wasn’t the sexiest one you could think of either: employment law in Ireland. Virtually all of the traffic is “search traffic”-traffic coming from Google Search from people typing in queries about various aspects of employment law affecting them.
But according to the Central Statistics Office in Ireland, the number of people in employment in Ireland in June 2013 was 1.8699 million people.
That’s a lot of people who might have questions or problems in their job. Throw in all the employers from the small business sector employing a handful of people and you have a lot of people with lots of questions.
The average payout in 2012 for an unfair dismissal claim was just over €18,000. So smart employers are looking for ways to ensure that they are not at the losing end of such a claim. They too are seeking answers.
Where do people go for answers to questions nowadays? The library? The newspaper? Magazines? TV? Radio?
Generally they search on Google. And that’s where almost all the traffic came from.
You might assume that this was a gargantuan task.
It wasn’t. In fact, it was easy.
I only published 40 posts and 13 pages. Five or six of the pages are “boilerplate”: an “about” page, a “contact page”, a “disclaimer” page and so on.
What I did do though was to write and publish fairly comprehensive articles about all aspects of employment law in Ireland. Not shallow, superficial stuff but detailed treatments of the topic with sources of legislation cited and linked to.
I did no promotion apart from sharing some links on LinkedIn. I can’t do pay per click-and I wouldn’t want to-because I lost my Adwords account years ago. I just published the articles, tagged and categorized them properly, and hungry (for information) employees, employers, and Google did the rest.
You are probably thinking: “surely it couldn’t have been this easy?” It was. And I am going to do the same thing again with another site in a different market.
Maybe I won’t be as successful with this new one. But I won’t have to be. If I get even a fraction of the traffic to the new site it will have repaid me many times over.
Because generating new leads, clients/customers is a numbers game. And in my game, my solicitor’s practice, the value of a new client far outweighs the cost of building these types of sites.
The cost? A .com domain name costs me $10.69 or €7.78 per year at today’s exchange rates. What’s the lifetime value of a new client?
As the MasterCard ad says: “priceless”.
Here is what I have found:
1. Focus your site tightly on your topic-it makes it easy for Google to figure out what your site is about and rank the pages highly;
2. Treat each sub-topic on your site comprehensively-forget about shallow, trivial articles;
3. Categorise and tag sub-topics rationally and sensibly-make it easy for your visitors and the search engines;
4. Don’t waste time on social media (apart from Google+)-just use sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to get your new content indexed (any traffic you get from them is a bonus);
5. Sign up for Google+ “authorship” and ensure each page has the Google+ authorship code on it;
6. Sign up for Google Webmaster tools and Analytics-this isn’t essential but in a later post I will explain how to increase traffic to your site with these 2 tools and without writing an extra word;
7. Collect emails-70% of your traffic will never be seen again for various reasons; email allows you to connect with them, stay in their mind, and position yourself as someone they know, like and trust. When they do recognise that you can solve their problem, or when they have the funds to afford what you are offering, or both you are there in their inbox as a trusted advisor;
8. The Irish market is wide open for this approach;
9. Learn the fundamentals of copywriting to ensure your new content is noticed and read- nobody gives a curse for “read my latest blog post”-what’s in it for the reader?
What do you think?
Have you tried this approach?
Have you any questions?
The topic of the site wasn’t the sexiest one you could think of either: employment law in Ireland. Virtually all of the traffic is “search traffic”-traffic coming from Google Search from people typing in queries about various aspects of employment law affecting them.
But according to the Central Statistics Office in Ireland, the number of people in employment in Ireland in June 2013 was 1.8699 million people.
That’s a lot of people who might have questions or problems in their job. Throw in all the employers from the small business sector employing a handful of people and you have a lot of people with lots of questions.
The average payout in 2012 for an unfair dismissal claim was just over €18,000. So smart employers are looking for ways to ensure that they are not at the losing end of such a claim. They too are seeking answers.
Where do people go for answers to questions nowadays? The library? The newspaper? Magazines? TV? Radio?
Generally they search on Google. And that’s where almost all the traffic came from.
How I Did It (and you can too)
You might assume that this was a gargantuan task.
It wasn’t. In fact, it was easy.
I only published 40 posts and 13 pages. Five or six of the pages are “boilerplate”: an “about” page, a “contact page”, a “disclaimer” page and so on.
What I did do though was to write and publish fairly comprehensive articles about all aspects of employment law in Ireland. Not shallow, superficial stuff but detailed treatments of the topic with sources of legislation cited and linked to.
I did no promotion apart from sharing some links on LinkedIn. I can’t do pay per click-and I wouldn’t want to-because I lost my Adwords account years ago. I just published the articles, tagged and categorized them properly, and hungry (for information) employees, employers, and Google did the rest.
You are probably thinking: “surely it couldn’t have been this easy?” It was. And I am going to do the same thing again with another site in a different market.
Maybe I won’t be as successful with this new one. But I won’t have to be. If I get even a fraction of the traffic to the new site it will have repaid me many times over.
Because generating new leads, clients/customers is a numbers game. And in my game, my solicitor’s practice, the value of a new client far outweighs the cost of building these types of sites.
The cost? A .com domain name costs me $10.69 or €7.78 per year at today’s exchange rates. What’s the lifetime value of a new client?
As the MasterCard ad says: “priceless”.
The Lessons You Can Learn
Here is what I have found:
1. Focus your site tightly on your topic-it makes it easy for Google to figure out what your site is about and rank the pages highly;
2. Treat each sub-topic on your site comprehensively-forget about shallow, trivial articles;
3. Categorise and tag sub-topics rationally and sensibly-make it easy for your visitors and the search engines;
4. Don’t waste time on social media (apart from Google+)-just use sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to get your new content indexed (any traffic you get from them is a bonus);
5. Sign up for Google+ “authorship” and ensure each page has the Google+ authorship code on it;
6. Sign up for Google Webmaster tools and Analytics-this isn’t essential but in a later post I will explain how to increase traffic to your site with these 2 tools and without writing an extra word;
7. Collect emails-70% of your traffic will never be seen again for various reasons; email allows you to connect with them, stay in their mind, and position yourself as someone they know, like and trust. When they do recognise that you can solve their problem, or when they have the funds to afford what you are offering, or both you are there in their inbox as a trusted advisor;
8. The Irish market is wide open for this approach;
9. Learn the fundamentals of copywriting to ensure your new content is noticed and read- nobody gives a curse for “read my latest blog post”-what’s in it for the reader?
What do you think?
Have you tried this approach?
Have you any questions?
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