Again in 2011 I created eventcountdown.com. It had a snazzy downloadable, PerfectTablePlan-branded countdown clock for Home windows and web-based countdown clock with advertisements for PerfectTablePlan. Each free. The concept was individuals trying to find countdown clocks for occasions (akin to their marriage ceremony) would discover the location through Google, discover out about PerfectTablePlan and a sure proportion would then purchase my event seating planner software.
I paid different individuals to create the Home windows and internet variations of the countdown clock. The online-based clock was up to date every so often so as to add pre-built countdowns for occasions like superbowl, the olympics, christmas, thanksgiving and so on. And I fielded the occasional assist emails associated to the Home windows countdown clock.
That is the entire site visitors to the location from 2011 to 2023:
The peaks are largely because of superbowl. The positioning bought 38k hits in a single day simply earlier than superbowl 2019! The free Home windows countdown clock additionally drew numerous site visitors. In whole the location bought some 1.7 million web page views over 12 years. Solely a small proportion of those guests clicked by to PerfectTablePlan.com, however nonetheless a helpful quantity. Maybe some individuals have been additionally prompted to analyze PerfectTablePlan by the branding on the downloadable clock. The positioning might need additionally had some search engine optimisation advantages for PerfectTablePlan.com. Who is aware of.
The eventcountdown.com web site is now gone (the area redirects to PerfectTablePlan.com). It didn’t appear well worth the effort to maintain including occasions to the net countdown clock with the site visitors now so low. Additionally each the web site and home windows clock have been trying dated. However I believe it was a worthwhile funding of my money and time.
I’ve additionally created numerous different contents pages and mini-sites over time: articles on desk planning, font collections, free clipart, place card templates and so on. You possibly can see related trajectories for a few of these.
The site visitors appears to succeed in a peak after 3-7 years after which slowly decay away. Though I’ve proven them with the identical vertical scale right here, some generated much more site visitors than others.
I did some primary on-page search engine optimisation for these content material pages. For instance, Adwords key phrase knowledge to decide on the web page title and H1. However nothing past that. No paid promotion or backlink constructing campaigns.
I attempted paying individuals to jot down articles associated to occasions. However none of those ever generated any worthwhile site visitors. Google might someway odor the insincerity.
For my data cleaning software product I’ve been concentrating on ‘the right way to’ pages and supporting movies aimed toward particular subjects. These are supposed to each assist present prospects and to draw new site visitors. For instance, how to clean data. I’ve additionally been posting these movies on the Easy Data Transform YouTube channel. The numbers of hits month-to-month on the Youtube movies are comparatively low, however they’re fairly focused and hopefully will likely be producing site visitors for years to come back.
So content material advertising and marketing take-aways primarily based on my expertise are:
- Free content material is usually a helpful technique to deliver free site visitors to your web site.
- The quantity of site visitors you get is kind of hit or miss. Some content material has generated much more site visitors than anticipated, some rather a lot much less.
- The content material must be effectively focused if you wish to have any probability of changing it to gross sales.
- Google will develop bored of it will definitely. You would possibly be capable of enhance the longevity by updating the content material. I’ve not been very diligent with this, however even uncared for content material pages can generate helpful site visitors over 10+ 12 months lifespan.
