My best friend is a stay-at-home dad. Last Halloween, he blogged about funny pumpkin carvings and quickly started ranking on that term.  His traffic went from a few dozen visits a day in late October to a couple of thousand daily uniques right at Halloween.  It’s now one year later, the content is unchanged, and we see traffic building up. Here’s the traffic trend through October 8th, just 3 weeks away from Halloween.

As you can see, it’s gone from a couple of visits a day to about 80 visits a day.  I’d estimate that by the time Halloween hits, we’ll be up to 2,000 visits a day this term, which would be slightly more than last year.  He’s already ranking #2 on this term, as well as a number of other Halloween keywords.

WHAT YOU CAN LEARN FROM THIS

Consider what posts you’ve written that have season value.  Got something about your favorite Christmas stories.  You get another shot this year around to get a multiple of what you did last time.  This time, you’re already ranking and have had a chance to evaluate what keywords drove your traffic. Thus, you know now how to send link juice to this post and what terms are valuable.  It’s like watching re-runs of a game show you’ve already seen– you already know the answers. So if you can’t win, something is wrong.

TAKE ACTION

Maybe you have a winning egg nog recipe.  Now create one on hot spiced cinnamon cider or related topics and link these articles together.  Get your friends to link to you on these new articles.  You already know Google likes you for a certain set of terms, so as long as you stay close to those, you’ll be able to expand out and get more traffic on similar terms.

If you have some high-resolution pictures, that will help you in image search. Integrate Facebook Connect as Keith has done, and you get another multiplier of traffic since Google is indexing Facebook pages.  Getting more comments on your post will also help you get more traffic– there’s more content to index, plus Google sees that your site is heavily visited and commented on.

Love to hear about your experiences here.

Dennis Yu

Dennis Yu is co-author of the #1 best selling book on Amazon in social media, The Definitive Guide to TikTok Ads. He has spent a billion dollars on Facebook ads across his agencies and agencies he advises. Mr. Yu is the "million jobs" guy-- on a mission to create one million jobs via hands-on social media training, partnering with universities and professional organizations. You can find him quoted in major publications and on television such as CNN, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NPR, and LA Times. Clients have included Nike, Red Bull, the Golden State Warriors, Ashley Furniture, Quiznos-- down to local service businesses like real estate agents and dentists. He's spoken at over 750 conferences in 20 countries, having flown over 6 million miles in the last 30 years to train up young adults and business owners. He speaks for free as long as the organization believes in the job-creation mission and covers business class travel. You can find him hiking tall mountains, eating chicken wings, and taking Kaqun oxygen baths-- likely in a city near you.

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