Event traffic. How Yandex eats up non-commercial traffic

Earnings on event / seasonal traffic RUB 500,000 / month. The case was written by me as part of a competition for one of the closed forums, which is now in the “dying” stage, so that the information does not disappear, I post it here.

Making money on seasonal / event traffic is always an up-to-date and successful strategy. There is always room in event traffic, fast results in event traffic, competition in event traffic is usually lower.

There is a lot of event and seasonal traffic, it is always new, an unlimited number of countries and languages ​​are available for work. It is ideal for doorways and fast gray schemes.

Event traffic topics:

• Sports events (tournaments, etc.);
• Holidays;
• Any events (exhibitions, OSKAR awards, theaters, rock star performances and whatever);
• Political and news events (Russian-Ukrainian crisis, war in Syria, ISIS, presidential elections in France, etc.);
• Release of a new product (Tesla machines, super-new weight loss simulator Zerber 2000+, release of new technology, and more);
• Thousands of other unlimited topics to work with, always something new. Every day. In all languages. Worldwide.

Keys:

• SemRush / Ahrefs / analogs;
• Google.Adwords - Keyword Planner or Wordstat.Yandex;
• Parsing hints;
• As in any other webmaster business - any method of collecting keys will do;

How to earn:

• Google Adsense - will accept almost any event traffic and pay generously for every click;
• CPA - there are millions of offers, all over the world, in any country, for every taste. It is enough to type "affiliate program" in the language you need + the name of your subject and you will plunge into the vast world of SPA networks.

I use only these two methods of monetization and I think that they are enough with my head. Any popular offers close to the topic will also convert perfectly on event traffic.

Niche search:

• An excellent service will help you find a niche - here Google stores logos dedicated to various events. You can view it as you need and get a picture for what event to make sites.
• Google Trends is the oldest service - you can see everything in 3 clicks.
• Monitor other sites with announcements: if the niche is hard - sites with novelties and announcements of new devices, if the niche is sports - announcements of upcoming sporting events, etc.

There are hundreds of ways, to tell them all you need to write a book, but these basic ones will be enough for any income.

Event traffic case # 1 - Runet

A year ago, the FIFA World Cup was held in Brazil. A new domain was taken, a beautiful and simple free theme (template) was taken and the WordPress engine (RU language) was installed. The site was uploaded with information copied from other sources: pictures of stadiums, participating countries, some tables, videos, etc.

Those. copy-paste from 2-3 sites on which this information was contained. This ended up with about 50 pages. The main page displays the stadiums, the counter until the World Cup has N days left, pictures-promotions of the championship, a couple of YouTube videos, several sentences with kei: World cup soccer, 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil and the like.

Roughly speaking, the site was a very competent "mix" of photo-video, tables, texts. The content was “packed in a beautiful wrapper” and responded to user requests.

2-3 hours of work were spent on everything, the site was sent to the add-on and for 2-3 months it waited in the wings. A few weeks later, the reference mass was purchased in SAP (the budget is about 10,000 rubles per month), about 10 trust articles were bought on Blogun.

For monetization, the WilliamHill affiliate program and a couple of similar PP at rates were chosen. And also Google Adsense blocks were densely placed on the site. The background of the site consisted of the landing page of the affiliate program (just like the KinoPoisk website announces films), and also banners from PP and advertising blocks were densely placed.

During the championship, pages with the names of matches were created and on these pages a frame with online broadcasts of matches and a small description were posted.

As a result = TOPs for queries = traffic = clicks in Adsense = earnings in PP.

In general, the site brought in about 5,000 - 6,000 USD. within 2 - 3 months. After the end of the championship, the residual traffic remained a little, then it completely dropped to 10 people a day and the site successfully “went down in history” of the Webarchive.

Screens of income by case:

1. PP WilliamHill

2) Google.Adsense

Advice: look for slightly competitive similar niches and get traffic for them. In highly competitive even event events (for example, World Championships), there may not be enough knowledge and experience to raise significant traffic.

Seasonal traffic case # 2 - Bourges

The event niche was taken, but already under the bourgeoisie (language - English). The .COM domain was registered, the WordPress theme was selected and used.

No money was invested in the site for copyright, a "mix" of content was used by analogy with the site from the previous case, it took about 2–3 weeks for linking (manual link building) and SAPA was purchased (at the moment the site is completely filtered -).

I will not indicate the topic, as well as PP, it is enough to spend a few minutes following the links above (for example) and find a seasonal niche + PP for it. This is not a problem at all, there is only one problem - traffic!

Screens of income by case:

Total: earnings $ 7,300 for the month, which amounted to almost 100% net profit (about 500,000 rubles at the current USD / Russian ruble exchange rate).

The site continued to make a profit for a long time, until it came under the "Penguin" update, the site did a good job and deservedly retired.

Now let's talk more about the methods of generating event traffic, some of the main ones:

• YouTube - we take vidos on the topic of where our hands can reach, make a new YouTube channel (for the chosen niche / kei) and upload the video there in full (the main thing is that they are more or less relevant, but 100% similarity is not required), then it is written in the title of the video + in description + in tags, the keys we need are massively filled in (manually or automatically) and merge traffic (through a link in the description or annotation). Works great. There is a lot of traffic. There will always be. Fast effect.
• Facebook and other social platforms (Instagram, for example) - here everything is by analogy, who as they can, register accounts, make business pages / publics, there are more keys, pictures, videos and more.
• Doorways: also in terms of making money on event traffic - DOORWAYS are perfect. It's even easier here. A fairly broad and event-driven theme is chosen. Kei gather and go. Everything is according to the standard version. You can merge as “hard” as possible, because in the event, speed is important, and the consequences in the form of bans and filters are already less significant.
• Niche sites - massively and many. You can expand infinitely. We register domains, upload CMSs there, parse / generate, or, as in a case, manually insert more thematic content, put links and get traffic. It is also very good to prepare in advance. Make 10-20 sites for interesting topics in the foreseeable future and wait in the wings.

Summing up:

All you need to do is choose an interesting event niche with the potential for good traffic volume. Then you need:

A) Or create a niche narrow site for this topic, then you will receive priority in the PS even with well-promoted portals and will be able to collect traffic.

The largest portals with huge budgets and a staff of people cannot spill everything at once and never can. As you can see from case number 1, a small niche site quietly bypasses such old and trust sites like Championship.ru or Sports.ru and gets into the TOPs for the necessary keys.

A very important advice: choose less competitive topics, otherwise you may not have enough experience, finances, time to get the necessary TOPs. Fortunately, there are a lot of competitive seasonal / event topics where you can take TOP-3 or TOP-5.

B) Or generate doors by topic and skim the cream off.

C) In parallel, create (if desired) YouTube channels and Facebook landing pages.

D) Buying traffic in Google Adwords / Ya.Direct / other PPCs is an almost instant way to test a niche.

Event traffic is a great opportunity for mastering doorways (it's a hundred times easier than getting at least 100 unique ones in the same farm). Seasonal and event traffic is a great opportunity to test some of your best practices and assumptions - quick effect - quick result.

Event traffic is generally with minimal competition. Politics. News. New products. Everything moves and changes. There is always an opportunity to GO FORWARD.

Hey! Although the case is old, it is still possible to repeat it, since the main "trick" is the hype of the topic and event traffic.

The site was launched at the end of 2014 and sold in January 2016. I remember these times with warmth. Then there was no such rampant randomness in search engine algorithms, there was no crazy IPC from Yandex and merciless YMYL from Google 😊.
By the way, I will highlight all the important points and life hacks that can be applied now in italics. Do not think that the case with the age and excrement of the mammoth is completely useless 😉

At the time of the creation of this project, I had already been on the topic of making money on sites for over a year. During that period, I had several projects for links, bought on Telderi. I also tried to launch information sites with my colleague.

The idea to create a resource on the topic of the crisis was dictated by the economic situation in the country. And when Black Tuesday came, we decided that it was a hint from the Universe 😊 It was decided to register the domain and launch it.

Work plan

Before the launch, we planned all the work, assigned areas of responsibility:

1. I was in charge of SEO, semantics, author search and 50% of article placement.
2. My colleague is for technical part, TK for the designer and 50% of the placement of articles.

The work plan consisted of the following steps:

1. Design (find a theme, finish, draw a logo).
2. Collecting semantics for key themes which the crisis concerns in the first place.
3. Drawing up technical specifications.
4. Search for authors for fast writing of articles.
5. Fast posting of written articles.
6. Monetizing the first normal traffic.

Design

They didn't bother with the design. A colleague of mine found a minimalist clean theme. After minor edits and with the words "herak-herak and into production" I rolled out the finished version.

The logo, which is still hanging, was ordered from FL.ru for 500 rubles 😊

Semantic core

After registering the domain and creating a minimal design, we brainstormed to collect the semantic core. We decided to collect semantics on the following topics, as well as create the following headings:

1. All Russian crises –1991, 1998, 2008, as well as the new 2014–2015.
2. At the beginning there were not very many headings: Dismissals, Pensions, Unemployment, Salaries, Real Estate, Industry, Auto business, Economics. The semantics for them was going to be as negative as possible from the category “sales are falling, we will all die”! I think now such topics would be good for Zen😊.

1. A few months later, they added forecasts for the dollar and euro; forecasts for oil and gasoline prices; Loans, Tourism, Sanctions. And separately - the news section, where every day my colleague and I wrote 1-2 articles in turn.

Authors

After preparing the semantics, they made up the technical specification and sent them to ETXT. At that time, we did not yet have our own copywriters on a salary, we had to look for freelancers on the exchanges. By the way, in 2014-2015 it was not difficult to find a normal author for 20-25 rubles, and technical specifications were snapped up in 10-15 minutes.

The main articles for SEO were written very quickly and in a few days they were showing off on the site. Almost immediately, they started to bring traffic.

It is worth noting one trick that we used in drawing up the technical assignment. The authors had to write texts WITHOUT special reference to events. Where it was necessary to put dates, only the year was put down, so that next year could be changed to a new one. Readers wouldn't even notice. In this way, it was possible to achieve timeless content.😊

The articles consisted of general information on the crisis: how hard it is for people, how hard it is for the economy as a whole, as well as the opinions of experts, interpreted in the same way - without reference to specific events, so that it was impossible to determine the year from them.

I'm sure the articles would still be shooting now (albeit not so well), but the site was scored. More on that at the end.

Despite this approach, the articles went well and were commented on. Some have collected several hundred comments in a couple of months.

The big mistake I see now was writing the daily news. They did not attract traffic, but they took time, because we rewrote the news ourselves. It would be better to spend this time looking for related topics for headings, and then collecting semantics, compiling TK, etc.

Accommodation

The articles were posted by me and my colleague. At that time, we did not have content managers, but despite this, the articles were posted in the shortest possible time, since we were burning with this project and were afraid that if we did not hurry up, the topic would become too competitive and overheated.

Traffic

Surprisingly, there were only a few resources on the topic of the crisis, although there was a lot of traffic. In the second month after the start of the project, we broke the bar of 13,000 unique visitors per day!
Now a site with similar topics can be well fueled by traffic from Yandex.Dzen and Pulse from Mile.ru. With this approach, you can collect tens of thousands of unique items per day.

In addition, a traffic exchange affiliate network was connected to the site, and it was also added to the aggregator - Novoteka.

External optimization

Thanks to the pool of our own resources, among which there were about 20 media sites, the first links were placed from our projects, which provided a good foundation for the future.

In the future, the articles spread sharply on social networks, and also collected a large number of links from the forums. Links from forums accounted for 3-5% of total traffic.

Services

A completely different situation was with YAN. The chosen ones got there. For Yandex, our site did not appear to a select few 😊
In addition, we put up several banners from Admitad: credit cards from Tinkoff Bank and from the financial partner Leads.su. We made a separate tab with microloans, where they brought all the MFOs available at that time into one table. We had a hypothesis that people who read news about the crisis themselves suffered from the crisis.

In fact, this hypothesis did not justify itself. For all the time, only 1 card from Tinkov was issued and several microloans were approved. However, there were a lot of applications for microloans, 3-5 pieces a day, but they were not approved.

Since I had my own and partner resources that traded perpetual links on link exchanges, the site was added to GGL and PR.Sape, where the price was set at 1000 rubles per link. It was a very decent price per link at the time.

Decision to sell

The site has grown organically well. But in our naivety we thought that the crisis was coming to an end. The project will soon become irrelevant. For fear of missing the peak values, they put it up for sale.

At the time of sale (early 2016), my colleague and I completed the Marathon

It was decided to evaluate the site in 20 months of payback for the optimal price and in 30 months for Blitz.

As a result, the site was sold to a very persistent buyer for an optimal price. Although the auction was active, it could have sold for more. But the fear of missing "that very moment" to sell won out. The site went for the best price.

To warm up the auction in the description of the lot was asked to request all the information of interest in the comments. Therefore, the lot has always hung in Popular and attracted many people who wanted to see the URL, as well as those who were really ready to purchase the project.

I would like to dwell on the buyer separately. He was extremely persistent, which made us worry that we were missing out on some benefit the customer sees.

Having "smoked" all the ideas, they did not find anything that could give x2-3-5 for the growth of earnings. Therefore, we still decided to give the site for the best price.

As it turned out later, the buyer had his own affiliate program for issuing microloans. He thought that by hanging it on the site, he would get rich.

But as I wrote above, microloans did not come in, there were many applications, but they were not approved. The buyer got into the same situation, which is why after only 2 months he resold the site to another person for the same amount.

It should be noted that, in fact, we were in a hurry with the sale, because:

1. The topic could be expanded and expanded.
2. The crisis has not gone anywhere until now.
3. It was necessary to abandon the publication of news and send all forces to search for topics to expand the topic.
4. It was possible to create many more useful services, turning the site into a cool financial and economic portal.
5. Monetization could be improved many times over.
6. We decided to sell when the traffic began to sag a little, but we had to wait a little for some event in the economy. Then the site would show the best results in terms of traffic and it could be sold at a higher price.

And there was a lot more that could be done to increase traffic and income, and as a result, sell the site many times more expensive. But it's good to think in hindsight 😊

Despite all the shortcomings on this project, we managed to earn x5 from the initial investment. In total, about 50k rubles were spent, and the net earnings for the year amounted to 250k +.

The further fate of the site

For some reason, the new owner of the site hung up a product (shta! ??) and scored on him. True, after some time, he changed his mind and returned the Adsense blocks to their previous places instead of the product line.

The site is still alive, but since 2016, nothing has been added or updated there.

If the new owner changed the dates of the articles (in meta tags and texts), he would receive traffic. But, apparently, the person's interest in the project has disappeared completely.

What is the use of the case?

As I wrote at the very beginning, a similar case can be repeated now, but much more successfully. What do I need to do?

1. Expand semantics to bitcoin, the approaching global crisis, which is promised in 2021 (topics by type: will there be a crisis in 2020, will there be a crisis in 2021, how much will the dollar cost in January 2020, etc.), strikes all over Russia, riots all over the world (Hong Kong, Libya, Chile, etc.). The main thing is to make full-fledged longreads and not try to turn the site into a newsletter with daily news reports. Just write analytical articles, but with an emphasis on the fact that they will be alive in 2020 and 2021 and 2022, simply by changing the dates in the meta tags and texts.

1. Add useful services: calculators, currency quotes, organization directories by subject, etc.

1. Add for Yandex.Zen and Pulse.Mile website. Yes, connecting Zen or Pulse to RSS is a difficult task now, but you can post the same articles there as on the site.

1. Add traffic exchange teasers, try to add the site to Yandex and Google News.

1. Get the most out of monetization: YAN, Adsense, affiliate programs, push notifications.

Let's decide what we are dealing with.

Promoting a local news site will lead to much more modest results than, for example, promoting a site for an all-Russian TV channel simply because they have completely different audience sizes. Attendance rates depend on the region of coverage: for local media, it can be quite normal to have a visit of several tens of thousands of visitors, and for federal media - in a million.

Promotion of an information resource on the Internet begins with solving problems that are inherent in all sites of this type.

Typical SEO problems for news sites

Search engine compliance issues are experienced by all web media resources that have never been optimized. If the site collects more than 200 thousand visitors per month, then after fixing the SEO problems, it will be able to gain 600 thousand. The only limitation here is the size of the region's audience.

The main SEO problems of news resources:

• Duplicate pages and content.
• Empty or duplicate meta tags.
• Copied content (no attribution assigned to the site).
• Unadapted resource for mobile devices.
• Complex navigation and confusing structure.
• Useless and low-quality interlinking (several identical links on the same page or links to pages with 404 errors).
• Slow page loading speed.
• Unstable indexing of pages.
• The lack of a site in news aggregators and in social networks.
• Unstable hosting.
• Lack of security protocol.

It is with these shortcomings that we most often have to fight in practice.

How to Promote a News Site: A Guide to Action

Now let's break down how to promote a news site.

Types of search terms to use

When promoting an information site, there is no semantic core in the classical sense, since the traffic of such a site is mainly news and event-driven. The main goal here is to publish relevant news as quickly and often as possible. Thanks to interesting and timely content, the site will have visitors, even if the user's search query is inaccurate. The main search traffic of electronic media is formed precisely by such natural low-frequency queries: if at a given time people are interested in a certain topic, they will search and find information on it in different ways. The main thing is to get into this interest.

But the semantics are still matched, and in the case of news portals, this is a limited set of extremely high-frequency queries: for example, "news from Ulyanovsk", "news from Ulyanovsk today", "news from Ulyanovsk online" and any other variations with cities, regions and settlements. It is possible and necessary to optimize sections of the site for these requests.

The technical side of strength

We partially return to the point about SEO problems and analyze how to solve them.

1. Service files.

First you need to configure robots.txt file by giving search engines direct rules - whether or not to add pages to the search engine index. The file should not contain the following lines:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /

Another file in need of customization is sitemap.xml... To promote information resources, setting this file is critical: search robots crawl the site sequentially, page by page, and news sites have a lot of pages. Knowing about crawling budget, the owner of the web resource must make indexing as easy as possible for search engines - give them a direction, draw a route. The role of a guide here is assigned to the sitemap file, which helps search engines not get lost and crawl the site faster. To create a sitemap, you can use special automatic modules - Yandex spoke about them in detail.

1. Broken links.

The main reason for the appearance of such links, externally visible and leading nowhere, is invalid code. Use a validator to find code errors and challenge the programmer to fix them.

1. Duplicate content and meta tags.

Duplication is bad because the robot can throw out both the original and a copy of the page from the issue. And for web media sites, technical duplicates are a very common problem: the page is also available at the URL www.site.ru, and at website.ru... Or at site.ru / page-1 and at the address site.ru/page-1/.

To avoid this duplication, you need to configure the main mirror at the program level so that from all address variants the user automatically goes to the main, correct address.

It is better to delete all unnecessary pages, although this is more difficult. Use to find incorrect addresses and remove them. In the same way, the problem of duplicate meta tags is solved: find and neutralize, that is, uniqueize.

It is impossible to fill in more than 50,000 meta tags manually, so use scripts: write meta tags according to a specific template for the pages of each section. For example, in news sections