Google trends drives traffic
I have a total of four blogs in my stable, all with a different focus. When I originally started this site, I intended MMM (as I call it) to be more of a personal blog than my other three. Whereas I hardly ever talk about family or work on my other sites, MMM contains quite a few posts about daily happenings, family stuff, and other personal issues. As such, I don’t promote this one at all, and don’t even tell people that I have it. I find that I’m able to write much more freely when I can be anonymous like this.
But unfortunately, my personal life isn’t exciting enough to generate decent traffic numbers. So over the past few weeks I’ve been experimenting with topics culled from the Google Trends list of top 100 searches, and I’m happy to report an enormous increase in hits since I’ve started writing that way.
Of course, writing about the keywords that appear in Google Trends isn’t a guarantee that you’ll see a traffic spike. After all, they list 100 terms, and those terms are updated several times per day. So something that’s No.1 at 7am might not even be on the list at all at noon. It’s all very hit or miss.
For example, a couple weeks ago, I wrote about the Victoria Lindsay beating and posted a video of it. Even though it wasn’t the full Victoria Lindsay beating video (just a censored one from a news station), I ended up getting more than 900 hits on the story. That one turned out to be a goldmine as far as traffic was concerned.
But just last week, I posted about Cypress Bay High School (featured in the MTV reality show The Paper) because it was the No.1 search term one day, and only received a dozen hits on that post.
Regardless, I think it’s clear that people are more interested in reading about my take on some of the hottest news stories of the day than about how my latest orthodontist appointment went. Sure, I’ll still keep the personal posts coming every once in a while, but for the most part, I think it’s time for this blog’s focus to evolve. After all, what’s the point of writing on a daily basis if no one ever reads it?