How to drive a lot of traffic, fast
Take advantage of what’s happening in the news.
No, really. I’m not kidding. This isn’t a trick post to point out the obvious. It’s just sometimes in our quest for the new and the unique that I think we forget some of the most basic fundamentals.
Fundamentals like taking advantage of what’s happening in our world today to drive traffic, engagement, interaction, etc.
Lessons from CNN
Take the recent inauguration of President Obama for instance. CNN got smart, and partnered with Facebook to provide live streaming of the inauguration at at CNN.com Live. In one day, Mashable reported the following numbers:
- CNN had generated more than 136 million pageviews
- CNN.com served more than 21.3 million live video streams
- 600,000 status updates posted through the CNN.com Live Facebook feed
- At its peak, CNN served 1.3 million concurrent live streams (this occurred immediately before Obama’s speech)
CNN didn’t have a strategy team meeting one day to drum up ideas of how they could manufacture something that would generate nearly 140 million pageviews on their site. No, they recognized that by themselves they could not generate a fraction of the buzz that one of the most important historical events in our country could.
Athletes in Action takes advantage of news media coverage
We had a similar opportunity with Athletes in Action (a ministry of Campus Crusade) in January (albeit on a smaller stage than the inauguration). Athletes in Action had testimonies from Christians on virtually every single team in the BCS National Championship College Football series.
And the big newsworthy item was this: Tim Tebow and Sam Bradford, the two Heismann trophy-winning quarterbacks in the national championship game, are outspoken Christians with tremendous testimonies.
These football players were going to get major press coverage that we could not manufacture even if we wanted to.
So we took advantage. We rode the wave, so to speak. We created an entire online campaign around getting the word out to drive people to www.beyondtheultimate.org to watch testimonies, read stories, and tell others about the site.
We used Facebook pages and groups and posts and video and bumper stickers and pieces of flair. We sent emails. We used YouTube. We did banner ads. We used Google paid search.
In all, there were 27.1 million campaign impressions.
And in all this, the campaign was successful because we were taking advantage of something that had national media attention, and parlayed that attention into something Athletes in Action wanted people to see.
Sure, we created a great campaign — but great work by itself without the key ingredient of a newsworthy topic will never be able to generate as much attention.
