Thirty days ago I started my Marketing Ideas En Masse trail to see what kind of results I could produce. Wow, am I amazed by the results of the test trial. Let’s dive into the numbers and see what we find.

Effects of a 30-day trial on search results

Before this trial I was averaging about 90 search engine hits a day and growing (slowly). About last week I started averaging 200 hits a day mostly from Google. So in 3 weeks I doubled my search engine traffic and it seems to be holding pretty steady. Some of my most successful posts are:

• Marketing Ideas #17 Tim Ferriss Trial by Fire on the History Channel
• Tim Ferriss Trial by Fire a huge success leading to a new show
• Marketing Ideas #14 McDonalds Free Coffee Monday
• Marketing Ideas #20 McDonalds Anti Starbucks Marketing Campaign

Each of these stories is more or less a new topic at the time of writing that I was able to take 1st or very near the top of the search engine due to their freshness in the search world.

How to beat out other blogs on a new topic

I have to admit that I had an advantage in taking the top positions on a number of these searches just by posting. I run a WP Plugin call Auto Social Poster on this blog that helps to automatically bookmark posts on sites like Delicious and Flurl. What happens is pretty simple. I hit publish and in a matter of 15 minutes I have a post with backlinks zooming to the top of the search engines. In the case of the search term Seth Godin Tribes I outranked Seth Godin’s site and Amazon.com for the first 24 hours. I am still just below them both.

Conclusion of 30-day trial

I view the trial run as a success where I am now getting twice the search volume daily than I was at the start of the trial. Another thing I realized is how important it is when boosting search traffic to blog about new things. With the amount of backlinks Auto Social Poster gets me from the start tends to carry the post on the first page of Google for a while. Without building more or better backlinks, those results will slide but at the same time so does the search volume. I will plan another 30-day trial soon and make it a little more daring. Have any ideas?

As I write this blog it has been raining in the state of North Dakota. You wouldn’t know it but old man winter is already beginning to show his face around here. Not to mention that he left about 3 months ago. That got me thinking of a marketing idea that I would try if I owned a more traditional brick and mortar business.

Let’s call it the Rainy Day Discount marketing strategy. Now this particular marketing idea would probably be geographically specific as you might not want to try it in Seattle or Portland. But let’s say for a place like Phoenix or Flagstaff, Arizona, it would definitely be worth a try.

Without telling anyone, I would offer a rainy day discount to all of my customers. “If it rains, you save” could even be the motto. A different mood always takes place when it is raining, like you need to be confined to the office or home in an attempt to not get wet. Sometimes rainy days can even be depressing. But what if you stop in to your local quickie mart and pick up your daily paper, cup of Joe and are greeted with 25% off at the cash register? You might be surprised and ask, why? To which the clerk chines in, “It’s a rainy day sale. When it rains, you save.”

I would be willing to bet that word would get around, especially if it were a business selling some sort of higher priced items. You could even have some fun with it.

Say if you had a newsletter or weekly subscription of some sort and like the local newspaper, you post the possibilities of future sales. “Well it looks like this week we have a 30% chance of a sale on Friday, so stay tuned.” Don’t forget to use your umbrella.

I know that an idea like this wouldn’t work everywhere, but there could be similar ideas to this one that will work with your seasonal changes. For instance, in North Dakota we could run a polar bear sale on the days that are below -20. Coffee extra