Short Term Website for Long Term Gain

One of the things I have learned recently is the value of short term sites and the value they can bring to an overall web development project. I had never really put much thought into this since most of the sites I had built previously had been long term projects. One thing to keep in mind is if you are doing a web development project for a short term promotion it will likely require a lot of focus during the time of the event.

For our team we wanted to take advantage of the statewide sporting event we just completed here in Missouri to generate unique content, drive awareness of our brand, and build long term backlinks to our site. We determined the best path to do this and then set about implementing the plan. Although we had chosen a sporting event to do a short term event around there are many other events that this can work for. In our case though our goal was to find a way to find an event that would drive large amounts of traffic, we could generate large amounts of content from, and we could directly provide value back to our primary site.

We all know that building a site with no plan to gain traffic is of no value, for us we used a combination of social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon) as well as banners on our main site and Google Adwords during the intial days of the site. Within a couple days of launch we already could see backlinks coming from some high traffic cycling blogs and forums. Then while at the event we were able to jointly promote our coverage which in turn drove them to our primary brand. We made sure that in the majority of posts we made we had links to the community sites that we had created in the particular town or city we were reporting from. This meant that we had targeted viewers from those areas that ended up directly in their community portals.  As a side note we have noticed continued traffic in those communites, long story short, it worked.

For us we were looking for long term content and branding, in other cases you may not need this, it would of been possible to create a site like this and then sell week long advertising spots on it at a profit, or maybe build an affiliate store, or even Adsense to take advantage of the 10s of thousands of pageviews.

One challenge that you will have launching a site like this if it is for a popular or long running event or topic is ranking well in the search engines for the primary terms (in our case Tour of Missouri), as you can imagine it would be virtually impossible to rank on the first page of Google for an international cycling event for its primary search phrase after launching a site the day before the event.  But with some research on past searches we were able to determine what terms to focus on and build our site around as we did posts. That worked, within just a few days we were ranking on the first or second page of Google for virtually any term we chose to target and some that we did not expect. Oh yeah as a side note we did this all on a .ME domain competing against some of the top news sites on the web and in our region, the majority of our traffic was from search by the end of the week. There are certain phrases around video that we even ranked above the site that was solely there to provide video of the event on a day by day basis and is owned by NBC.

One other great way to get awareness of your short term site is YouTube, by putting links in our descriptions of our videos we could get targeted viewers to our site based on the fact they had searched for video content directly related to our site. We received several thousand viewers of our videos and it keeps going up by the hundreds daily, not bad for a niche topic and week long event, and yes we continue to get traffic from that.

We now have over 7000 pictures and 5 hours of video that still have to work from as we post content on this cycling focused site. One other note, do not focus on being the top news site on the web, you do not have to have the best photographer, the top Hi-Def video, our viewers kept coming back due to the grassroots feel of what we did. Although this post was focused on our event I hope this gives you a spark of an idea of what you may be able to do to promote a site you have by taking advantage of a high traffic/short term event or even just one site without a primary site to promote.