Event traffic. How Yandex eats up non-commercial traffic. Where to get themes

Summer 2019 is drawing to a close. It's time to summarize it, before the readers drown in the finstrips.

For a start, I could have complained that there was no heat at all this year. I didn’t sunbathe, didn’t go swimming. But I won't complain, because I don't like the heat. So for me this summer turned out to be extremely favorable in terms of temperatures. Therefore, he worked in full force.

The following offers brought the most money to:

1. Airbnb(ID: 30001) - a service for placing advertisements for renting housing. I have the undisputed leader this summer. Pays 966.30 rubles for the confirmed registration of a new user who rents out housing.
2. Cuntwars CPA (tutor)(ID: 31076) - Browser online card game for adults. Pays from 7 (Brazil, Mexico) to 157 rubles (Switzerland) for the player to complete the training. The offer is very good! I started testing it again, when there was a geo there once or twice, and it worked out.
3. Aliexpress Exclusive(ID: 27233) is my favorite offer in Cityads. ... Pays from 1.9% to 5.7% on sales. Its exclusivity lies in the fact (for those who do not know) that the approval time is 1 day.

How I didn't earn 11,226 rubles on MoreMMR from Cityads

I love, I can, I practice to mine and monetize. As an example, here is a screenshot from the metric of one of my narrow-site sites.

I always act according to the same scheme:

• Finding a suitable upcoming event.
• Analyzing search results on request.
• I am doing an optimized post based on the available material.
• I insert an affiliate link to the thematic offer in the article under the first paragraph.
• On the day of the event, I get traffic, leads, sales and commission.
• After the event, there is residual traffic for some time, which also brings me money.

Nothing supernatural. The main thing is to have a niche site and understand at least a little in the subject.

So it was this time. Game project for a computer game. I quickly bungled a post for some event, I don't remember exactly which one. It was just during the analysis of the search results that I saw that there is a chance to climb into the top-1. I inserted (including) a link to the offer MoreMMR Direct(ID: 31298) from Cityads.

On the day of the event, I flew into the first line of Yandex search results. Let's go registration. Oh yeah, I forgot to say that MoreMMR is a site that helps players to raise their level of play in Dota. They paid a percentage of domestic purchases. The offer has now been suspended.

Proposals for cooperation were immediately sent to the post office.

It often happens when I hit the top for a delicious request. But now is not about that.

The event died down, traffic began to fall, I went to the City to check how things were going. The commission hung in the open. Okay, let it hang, you never know how much the advertiser will check. Although, what is there to check if they pay a percentage of sales.

Some time later, I again came across this open commission in statistics. I decided to write to technical support, to ask that money has been hanging there for so long. For the first time I received a standard answer about “potential earnings”, but I have not been working for the first day, so I finally achieved intelligible explanations. It turned out that there was some technical problem with the auto-key. They promised to conduct a manual reconciliation.

And so it all dragged on. I was busy with my daily routine, I didn't bother much with the manager. The problem with auto-approval was solved, but the advertiser was in no hurry to send reconciliation of leads. After another ticket, it turned out that there were only 2 conversions. Either they made a crooked integration with the partner network, or something else. The money came in rubles, but they were counted as if in dollars and the corresponding figure was recorded in my statistics. It's funny.

I have no complaints here. Just an interesting case from practice.

How I poured into the dumplings from the context on Throne: Kingdom at War from Cityads

But here my indignation knew no bounds, although the numbers were small. But the fact itself is alarming.

My partner and I decided to roll out a website for you, blog readers, a case for draining traffic from contextual advertising to some simple offer. Whether it is positive or negative, it doesn’t matter. Chosen Throne: Kingdom at War(ID: 29082) in Cityads. Browser toy about knights.

It was not easy to push the ad into Google Ads, since Google always swears at affiliate links with redirects. We started to buy traffic for general requests, because the context for the brand was prohibited. We left the link to work for a while in order to get the first statistics for further analysis.

At some point I go to the statues, and my traffic "into the dumplings" is drained. I write to the manager, they say, what the hell is going on. They turned off my offer without warning ?! It turned out that the advertiser decided to start checking traffic, and in order not to penalize and not to write off charges, it was decided to transfer the offer to the “limited” status. Why I was not notified of this in any way remains a mystery.

I don’t mind the money for tests. Ultimately, if I don’t make money on the link, then at least I’ll write a post for you. Maybe you can somehow pull it out as a plus. But I don't want to throw the loot into the pipe at all.

Yes, I eat 2 times more in a cafe at a time than I managed to merge here, but the very fact saddens. I have a lot of where and where the traffic goes. What if next time instead of 500 rubles 5,000 will fly down the drain ?!

At one time, I generally began to worry that City was doing badly. Search stopped responding from the beginning of June in the official thread. They also wrote completely rotten on social networks, but now they seem to have resumed their activity. I would like them to develop. After all, with me.

Translated blog to PHP 7.3

For a long time I had a problem hanging in a tudushka. But here a warning has already come out directly that you need to update the PHP version, or tryndets. I had to go to Google and see how to do it. The basic WordPress tutorial was not enough, but I took it as a basis.

I will briefly describe what and how to do. It will come in handy in the future, similar to moving to https.

1. Made a backup. She came in handy in the process, because I managed to break everything.
2. Updated all plugins. My WordPress itself was fresh.
3. Installed the plugin PHP Compatibility Checker and checked all the stuffing for compatibility with the latest PHP version.
4. Found two critical bugs.

In line:

if (get_settings ($ value ['id']) === FALSE) ($$ value ['id'] = $ value ['std'];) else ($$ value ['id'] = get_settings ($ value ['id']);)

Indirect access to variables, properties and methods will be evaluated strictly in left-to-right order since PHP 7.0. Use curly braces to remove ambiguity.

I started to google it. On one of the forums I found the same problem and solution:

The code from the middle column helped me. If you see any "shoals" somewhere - write in the comments. I'm a complete layman in PHP, I can't do it without help.

Trip to Toratau, pickets, power combination competitions, Animau

A lot of events happened offline over the summer. I will only mention the main ones. If you are interested in all the details, subscribe to Instagram.

At the beginning of June he took part in the inter-club power combination competitions. He took third place. Got a card extension and all sorts of goodies. He shook 135 kg and pulled 180 kg. Could have been better, but still satisfied. Yet in more than 10 years.

A week later I went to the Heart of Eurasia International Festival of Arts. It was very cold. Then we drove with friends to barbecues several times, rested in nature.

A new building appeared at the dacha - a utility block. It was supposed to be a small tool shed, but a three-story something came out. This is because they hired Uzbeks who had their own vision of what was happening. 40,000 rubles were spent on materials, 60,000 - on the salaries of builders.

At the same time, elections to the City Council began in Ufa. gathered, nominated their candidate and collected signatures in his support. But the local administration had other plans. At first, two namesakes appeared as competitors (who then safely left). Then the electoral commission announced that we had fake signatures.

We filed a lawsuit. They demanded to show which specific signatures were fake. The court said that it had no reason not to trust the election commission and its experts. But the signatures were shown to us before the announcement of the result.

OK. We have lodged an appeal with the region's Supreme Court. They brought people to the meeting, whose signatures were recognized as fake (and one was even declared dead). But the judges said they had no reason not to trust the trial court. They refused to call people sitting in the corridor to confirm their signatures.

If you are interested in politics, you probably all seem familiar to you. And for good reason. Having made sure once again that the courts do not work as they should by law, we went to one-man pickets in our city. This time, the people who came were gladdened. There were more of them than usual. And some passers-by joined us right during the picketing.

At the end of July, we went to rest on the Shikhan Toratau in the Ishimbay region. It is an archaeological monument, subject to protection as a monument of national importance, a unique geological site included in the GEOSITES List of Geological Heritage of World Significance. In Bashkortostan, shikhans are actively being destroyed, so I decided to visit before it’s too late.

It was not very easy to get to the top, but I was able to. True, the phone was discharged by that time, so there are not many pictures. For some reason, there were a lot of some kind of flies. They constantly swarmed and landed on tourists. At the foot of the mountain, fat gophers ran and squealed loudly. Also, there is no normal toilet, but there is free wi-fi.

Many of us have information projects or news sites where we get the lion's share of traffic for requests that need to be able to predict.

When we talk about trends, then of course the first thing everyone will remember is Google Trends. Yes, it is certainly a very useful hint, but it is still a vector, not queries per se. Let's figure out what the trend gives us in principle.

So, everyone's favorite and hated iPhone. There is always a top request, for which all advertisers are fighting, it is stable regardless of time, making some information rally, for example, the presentation of the new Iphone 7.

Of course, always you can fight for the top request, even sometimes it happens that it brings benefits and conversions ( we are not tied to a specific request!), but what should we do if we need traffic, and the time and budget are quite limited? Or are we just monetizing traffic and it would be just stupid for us to get involved in a race with big players?

I have long preferred not to get involved in a budget rally, but I work with targeted traffic obtained by easier efforts (well, everything is relative and is learned in comparison). For example, in the above screenshot most would prefer to work for the future some of the queries that are already known from previous models and you just need to change the number 6 to 7.

And this is the right step, which allows you to have a sharpened page for the search query to the peak, by the time when almost everyone will be interested in it. But we do not always have such analytical information, and this is a very hackneyed version, according to which the absolute majority works. No, I'm not discouraging in any way, I repeat, step is correct.

What to do with the traffic that we can only partially predict? Let's take the schedule of the US elections and the main candidates for the post of chief moneymaker.

I do not discard the practice of work that goes BEFORE the event, work ahead of the curve, but I prefer very often to work out the event after the peak point, on the screen I circled this segment in green. Of course, this is not peak traffic, but this is its lion's share, which we will get very much an easy and accurate method, not guesswork and mask requests, but verified requests!

Great news, we will not hunt for cream, but for scraps! Does someone turn back? - well, then you will have to wait for another article about traffic "ahead of the curve" and about preparing for the cream)

It is unfortunate that my laziness did not allow me to arrange screenshots before updating the wordstat) and therefore I am writing an article right after it has been updated, but you can check the principle of operation on your own already on your topic and look at the history of requests.

An eventful event dated September 25, and I am writing an article on September 29, just when the "last update of the database" appeared) Well, okay, it won't hurt us. We take hockey process request masks, they are the same for each of these events in the given topic.

As we can see, there is a main request and various extensions, which are being worked out at the first stage that goes to peak traffic, until the event itself. The masks work, there are no questions here. But what should we do with what is clearly not in analytics before the event, because these are not all the queries that users are interested in.

So, we repeat, we work with masks during the period indicated by the green rectangle, this gives us excellent preparation for the initial traffic and we will compete in the search results with the same prelude lovers.

We miss the peak value, as a rule, the main traffic will be received by large portals, although we can also get under the distribution. And then, right after the event, straight with a machine gun or with your hands (who can do what), we begin process fresh data on requests.

Where to get them, because Wordstat will be updated only at the end of the month !!! The correct answer is simple, turn on the logic.

Most of the people who are in the yellow rectangle, just in the stage of collecting "waste", missed this event and will seek information, which means providing us with search queries. We are interested in search engines and Youtube... We just start to pull search tips from search engines and YouTube, which instantly respond to user requests and give us fresh, popular queries. We start collecting the cream quickly in the waste category.

Due to the new update of the Wordstat database, today it was not possible to remove beautiful numbers equal to zero in the morphology graph (and this is a usual "!" Request to the Wordstat), but we see that this is fresh requests from search hints who are still do not have direct occurrences of the request in YouTube, that is, the rollers have not been processed on them yet, it's just did not manage to spam YouTube, which, like a litmus test, shows us in which direction we need to dig (I'm not even touching on the issue of getting traffic from Youtube right now, that's another story !!!).

It is not for nothing that we introduced in Key Collector the parsing of search suggestions from Youtube and obtaining information about the number of competing videos and the number of direct occurrences of the request in the titles of videos. This is an extremely useful feature not only for video bloggers, but also for those who work with search traffic. It is necessary to correctly interpret the data, then it will be possible to squeeze the maximum out of the low-frequency component and receive not only search traffic, but also transitions from the corresponding media sites (a separate topic for a separate article).

Let's sum it up, I'm not going to describe the whole method of work and breed a bunch of competitors to my wards, I'm not going to tell (although I have already told you before) how to make friends with search engine bots and get into the top event results. I think for those who are engaged in this, this question does not contain any sacred knowledge.

Let's take into account some points that are indicated:

• "Fresh" should be received without waiting for the appearance of these queries in the general statistics of search engines.
• Fresh search queries will allow you to collect "leftovers" of the next few days after the event, which are very decent "cream" if you start from traffic.
• Fresh search terms appear very quickly in search suggestions.
• Don't ignore Youtube, it is able to tell you in which direction you need to take action to get traffic both from search and from the video hosting itself. Analyze and correlate data from YouTube.
• Efficiency is your strong point. Otherwise, the "leftovers" will be just "leftovers". This work is automated at times, if desired.
• The question of whether the search engines are “fed up” on the site should not be, we need to work on this at the very beginning and not interfere with the search engines in the future. And then you will receive your portion of traffic.

In the hockey theme, in the topic of just one match out of many that took place at this event, we squeeze more than 1500 conversions from search engines, not taking into account the most important request, which has no less traffic. That is, after working through the masks in the first period and hurrying up, having worked through the tips and YouTube, we received a list of requests (not all on the screen, there are more than 300 of them), which gave us several thousand traffic from just one match!

Following a similar scheme, having worked on the MMA theme (namely, the last tournament UFC Fight Night 95 in Brazil) we got a couple of hundred transitions except for the main request, the most traffic one. And this is what we say about 1-2 days immediately after the event, that is, work with "late" users of search engines.

Here's a simple approach and adding non-standard sources for the analysis of search queries allows you to get your share of users from search engines to news and information sites.

This traffic can be multiplied by using a certain part of the networks of sites that are completely abstracted from each other, but at the same time indexed well enough (this is one of the most important conditions).

I hope this midnight text is written in a fairly understandable language, I have not written materials for a long time, but the blog is starting to come to life, we will share the information we have gained a little bit!

Event traffic is usually understood as a dramatically increased flow of people associated with the publication of some seasonal or one-time topical material on the site. We can talk about sales on the eve of the holidays, exacerbated topics during the election campaign or as a result of a resonant event in the world of public people.

In other words, an event is all that everyone is talking about now. If you talk about it on your website, the flow of visitors can grow dramatically.

A separate niche is news traffic. It is also eventful, as it is associated with changing events in a variety of areas, but it is a more stable influx of people that can be "converted". How?

• Speaking to the customer's world. If this is a buyer of a clothing store, he can be offered new images and brands of celebrities.
• Playing on landmark events through the prism of the services being sold.
• Offering something interesting in the light of their products, which the client did not know about (alternative ways of using it, for example, when the same pallets are used to create the interiors of expensive restaurants, and not loading).

Who needs event traffic

Event traffic and organic news are very effective solutions for those who intend to promote their brand, offer seasonal sales or promotions, work in the trash segment, and target a narrow audience. This approach works very well on sites that are purely feminine or masculine. It can be used by cosmetology, wellness sites, fashion stores. Poorly works "event" in the children's theme and SaaS.

Where to get news

The collection of information for quick publications (and the change of event content should be frequent) can be organized in different ways:

• monitor big news sites;
• view trending topics;
• "Spy" on competitors;
• choose interesting directions on forums and social networking groups;
• listen to expert opinions, etc.

How much to publish

There is no specific number of publications per hour, day, week. A lot here depends on the thematic direction and the season (in some niches, the seasonality is off scale). As a rule, here it is worth taking a daily update (at least 1 article per day) and a shift of the feed for a week by 5-10 positions.

Size matters?

Not every news item can be written on A4 page. Moreover, the reader does not need this. He wants to be in the know, to slip through the newsletter trying to cover everything for today. Therefore, when describing events and news, it is more profitable to focus on the quality of presentation, rather than the amount of material. Pictures, tables, diagrams, summary infographics - all this makes the material more structured, which means it is convenient for the reader.

The exception is important big headline news. In some cases, they require a detailed feed. Then from the text in the size of 500-1500 characters you need to go to longread ... Depending on the news item, it can be standard 3-5 thousand characters, and impressive 10-12 thousand characters.

In both cases, the structure becomes the priority. Even if the reader is very likely to read and study the material from beginning to end, he should leave the opportunity to run the article diagonally.

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 the algorithms of search engines, 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 in 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 - for the technical part, technical assignment for a designer and 50% of article placement.

The work plan consisted of the following steps:

1. Design (find a theme, finish, draw a logo).
2. Collection of semantics on key topics that are primarily concerned with the crisis.
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 one in 2014-2015.
2. At the beginning there were not very many headings: Layoffs, Pensions, Unemployment, Salaries, Real Estate, Industry, Auto Business, Economy. 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 showed off on the site. Almost immediately, they began to bring traffic.

It is worth noting one trick that we used in the preparation of 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 the 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 would not be possible 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 heated with 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 abruptly 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 the favorites 😊
In addition, several banners from Admitad were hung: 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. At the time, it was a very decent price per link.

Decision to sell

The site grew 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" for the sale 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 that 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 nevertheless 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 is worth noting 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 have shown the best results in terms of traffic and it would have been more expensive to sell it.

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 the 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 completely disappeared.

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, catalogs by the organization by topic, 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.