The passing of Michael Jackson was a sad moment in the history of the world and as a as a result of his untimely passing and huge media coverage, there were many reports of the increased traffic on the social networks and sites devoted to the King of Pop. Some reportedly could not cope with these increased traffic levels.
I thought I would use this post to show you just how much an increase in traffic was experienced, from my little corner of the affiliate world. A bit of background first – I set up a small “landing page” style site, with no content except for the main page (and of course the standard pages like a privacy policy and contact details), about 4 months ago. The sites primary aim was to sell Michael Jackson tickets for his upcoming tour of the UK at the 02 arena. I had about 3 auctions listed on the front page with links to tickets on eBay, a popular scalping location for his tickets (some went as high as £500 for a ticket). I had undertaken relatively little promotion on the site except for the some social submissions – it was intended as a PPC experiment. Subsequent to the experiment, I left the site untouched and it received a little attention from Google and the other search engines, with an average of about one visitor a day, with it peaking at about three per day. There were two key events where traffic to spiked – the first being the death of Michael Jackson and the second being the funeral, with the funeral providing a greater influx of visitors. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so below you can see the Google Analytics graph for a period of a month.
As can be seen above, traffic levels increased by around 2000% around the time of his death and about 4000% around the time of the funeral. Admittedly these are not astounding levels, but the increases are phenomenal.
The lesson learnt? As an affiliate marketer, always be on the lookout for (ethical and moral) opportunities to increase traffic and look for niches (obviously profiting from someone’s death does not fall into this category, but I had not set out to do that).
Suggestions? Ideas? Feedback? Please leave a comment!
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