December 8, 2007
Trend Marketing Case Study - Overview
I’ve been really into creating case studies lately, although I’ve yet to publish a lot of the content, it has inspired me to create yet another one on Trend Marketing.
Over the past several weeks there’s been a lot of buzz around Trend Marketing or Buzz Marketing. And with the launch of Project Quick Cash (specifically "Cashing the Spike" in this book), a heck of a lot more people are acquainted with this type of marketing.
Before I continue, let me give you my Definition of Trend Marketing (just in case some of you are unfamiliar with it):
Trend Marketing or Buzz Marketing is all about capitalizing on breaking news / trends / current events via pay-per-click or organic traffic that’s monetized with affiliate products, pay-per-lead, pay-per-action and/or contextual advertisement (think Adsense, Chitika, YPN etc.)
It’s a pretty simple concept really… just go where the traffic is.
Ok, now that you have an idea of what Trend Marketing is let’s move on.
This case study will be focusing on building a Blog from scratch and test the viability of Trend Marketing and see how quickly I can generate a decent amount of traffic to the site. By the way, if you are interested in learning Trend Marketing using strictly pay-per-click and see some case studies as well, you may want to check this out (this report costs $7, but it’s well worth it with over an hour of video).
In any event, for this case study I will only use free resources to build my blog and to generate traffic.
So far I have completed these steps:
- I chose a broad topic to create my blog on
- I created a Blogger blog
- Tweaked some Blogger components
- Added content - so far I’ve added 8 posts to this blog over the last 48 hours.
- Marketed blog
This whole process has taken me about 2 hours total (including the creation of the blog, content and promotional activities).
My intention is to create step-by-step tutorials for each of these steps, and you should see these released over the next week or so. After that I will keep adding updates to show you my progress with this blog.
Just so you know where I’m at, here are the current statistics and a quick look at my blog (I reveal the topic of my blog here):
High-res version of this video is available here (opens in a new window)
If you want to skip the video, here’s a quick snapshot of my stats from Google Analytics for the new Blogger blog:
As you can see I’ve had 211 visits to the site on Friday, the 2nd full day since launch, with 206 unique visitors (number at the bottom of the screenshot). Most of the visitors are from the US and Canada. Although you can’t see the figures in this shot, nearly 56% of the traffic came from organic search engine traffic while another 37% came from "referring sites" (social media). The balance came from direct traffic to my blog… my guess is that this traffic came through the "next blog" feature of the Blogger nav bar.
I won’t reveal the actual URL of this blog at this time, as I don’t want to skew my results (and if you find out… please don’t share with others).
Obviously I haven’t revealed any of the techniques yet, but don’t worry, I will be showing you each step shortly.
If you have any questions regarding the information or if something is not clear and you need more information, please pose your questions in the comments section below. I will try to answer them in the comments OR create a seperate post if necessary.
Tags: authority sites, blogger, trend marketing, trend marketing case study, affiliate marketing case study, affiliate marketing, buzz marketing, adsense, blog marketing
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10 Comments on Trend Marketing Case Study - Overview »
December 9, 2007
Jeremy Estes @ 2:42 am:
Hey Steve - Good luck with your project.
Don’t forget that there’s a very powerful “cheat” you can use to virtually GUARANTEE that you pull in more leads from this type of campaign:
READ THE BLOG COMMENTS WHERE THE STORIES BREAK!
Those are the people clicking your ads, and they’ll do anything for someone with a website who agrees with them… including signing up for crap.
just 2 cents.
neat site.
Jeremy
Steven @ 3:53 pm:
Thanks for the great tip Jeremy! I will definitely have a look at what other people are saying (in the comment section).
All the best, Steven
December 13, 2007
Tuppy Glossop @ 9:49 am:
I’m curious why you used Blogger … you’ve mentioned elsewhere that your blogging software of choice is Wordpress.
I know Wordpress very well, Blogger a little less well. Would your techniques work equally well on Wordpress?
Steven @ 12:31 pm:
Hi there,
A few other people asked me the same question as to why I used Blogger for this case study.
Here are some of the reasons I chose Blogger:
1. I wanted to take away all the “excuses” and show people a viable method of “blogging” and and driving traffic to their site that’s not predicated on having their own domain, knowing SEO, having “special” plug-ins, or knowing how to install and set up Wordpress blog from scratch.
2. Blogger is free and doesn’t require you to have your own hosting.
3. I know it well enough to make the blog look semi-decent and can set one up very quickly.
4. Of the hosted blog platforms, Blogger seems more Advertising friendly (vs. Wordpress.com for instance).
5. Blogger is owned by Google - It appears to me that a “fresh” blog on Blogger gets picked up faster by Google than other blogs.
And to answer your question, yes, you can use these techniques using Wordpress (or other platforms).
Hope this helps,
Steven
Terrance Charles @ 1:30 pm:
Steve, I preach this all the time on my blog. This is a MUST
use, if you want traffic to your blog, trend marketing is the
way to go, you go with what’s hot, what’s in demand, and from
there it takes off from comments to linkbacks, traffic and
sales, great tutorial.
Terrance Charles
www.terrancecharles.com/blog
Tuppy Glossop @ 4:01 pm:
Steven, thanks for the explanation … all very sensible reasons.
I’d wondered too about your fifth point (Google’s ownership of Blogger). Annoying if that is the case but perfectly understandable and, I suspect, quite likely.
Another question if I might; any issues with mixing up Google accounts (of which I have several) and AdSense logins (of which I have just one)? I wonder if I should use the same account on Blogger as I do for AdSense, or does it not really matter?
Steven @ 10:50 pm:
Hi Tuppy,
I don’t think it really matters.
I only use two Adsense accounts (a personal and a business account) and I must have a dozen Google Accounts… and I’ve never had any issues with mixing them around.
All the best,
Steven
December 17, 2007
Blogging for dollars - blogging trends | Blogging for Dollars Blog @ 5:37 pm (Pingback)
[…] Marketing Diary has an interesting new case study - Trend Marketing Case Study - Overview: “This case study will be focusing on building a Blog from scratch and test the viability of […]
February 17, 2008
John @ 1:41 pm:
Hi Steven,
These days I cost much time reading your blog.I like reading this kind of case study. You share and teach much useful things.
So I clicked you ADsense Ads, I will do this every time comes here(I rarely click other people’s ads)!
Doing this for thank you!!!
June 21, 2008
Gary @ 7:08 pm:
Hi Steve,
I purchased Current Events Domination about four months ago
& had a hard drive failure & lost it.
I heard Kris sold his site, but not Current Events Domination.
Are you still getting affiliate payments to your paypal account for Current Events Domination.
I plan on marketing the product again, before the hard drive crash, I got a few instant payments to my paypal account just by using a sig file in forums.