Tweet Schedule

Tweet about your contest on the first day of your contest, during the mid-point of the contest, and on the last day of the contest. The first tweet brings the existence of the contest to your

Twitter followers. The second tweet lets them know it is still ongoing and advertises it to those unaware of it. The third and final tweet is for the people that were on the fence of entering your contest and also to bring it to the attention of those that were unaware of its existence up to that point.

When to Tweet the Contest

When Twitter is most heavily trafficked during the day is a good time to tweet about your contest. Common sense told me that time was mid-day and some others feel the same way. From Gary McCaffrey

I have charted them below showing how many visitors came  [to my site] at what hour of the day.

As you can see, the spike is between 12 noon and 2 p.m. From WebsiteDesignNewcastle,

The busiest time on Twitter is GMT 1900-2100 (7pm to 9pm). It doesn’t take a genius to figure out this is lunchtime in the USA and in most Pacific time zones.

The quietest time on Twitter is GMT 0700-0900 (7am to 9am). That’s the midnight shift in the USA.

Hashtags

Get your tweet exactly in front of of the people that we will take action on them and click through to your contest, giveaway, and sweepstakes. Use Hashtags. I spoke about them in this post: How to Advertise your Movie Review aggressively on Twitter. The Hashtags that will make your tweet show up in the right Tweet searches are: Prize, Win, Free, Competition, Contest, Giveaway, DVD, Blu-ray, Movie, Film, and Sweepstakes. This modus operandi requires you to manually tweet your contests, most automated service will not add Hashtags, they will only tweet the title of the post and a redirect URL. If a service orb plugin does allow the use of Hastags, it will add those Hashtags to all your tweeted posts.

In the beginning

I usually begin my contest, giveaway, or sweepstakes tweet with WIN, in all caps. This signifies that there is something to be gained – a prize – by clicking through the link provided. It’s incentive advertising within your tweet.

In Conclusion

Use every social medium you can to promote your contest, giveaway and sweepstakes, especially Twitter. Billboard your contest instantly on Twitter during high traffic times and maximize the eyes on your contest tweets with the appropriate Hashtags.

As was mentioned in our Rotten Tomatoes, Your Movie Reviews, Recognition, and Website Traffic post, you have to be part of a recognized film critics society to be accepted into Rotten Tomatoes as a film critic as well as other film review aggregators. The following is the admittance criteria for OFCS:

Membership applications are accepted every year between March 1 and July 31. Applications are judged by Talent Scouts, a committee of volunteer OFCS members coordinated and overseen by the Governing Committee. All OFCS members, including those on the Governing Committee, may serve as Talent Scouts, but all Talent Scouts’ votes count equally. To be admitted, an applicant must be approved by a 2/3 majority of the Talent Scouts.

The Talent Scouts will use the following criteria:

1. Applicant must show at least two years of experience in the field, with indications of ongoing work.

2. Applicant must show at least 100 published film reviews. Reviews of current theatrical releases, older films, DVD and Blu-ray releases, and TV shows qualify. Reviews must be at least 400 words in length.

3. Applicant must have, or write for, a website of professional quality.

4. Applicant must offer meaningful contributions to the field of film criticism.

The following are NOT eligible for OFCS membership:

* Writers whose primary media affiliation is a print publication, or radio or television.

* Writers whose online work was originally contracted for print publication and is only being republished online; or broadcast journalists whose radio or television broadcasts are only being republished online.

No one may apply for OFCS membership on behalf of someone else. Potential OFCS members must apply directly, of their own accord.

The Online Film Critics Society website can be found here. Visiting may be a good idea. You can check out the quality of film reviews necessary to gain admittance into the OFCS and make the necessary adjustments – if need be – to your movie review writing. You can also see first-hand one of the ancillary benefits of OFCS membership: increased movie website traffic.

Was this a good heads up for you and your movie website?

I made one prediction more than eight months ago and two days ago it paid off big time.

Here’s what happened and how I went from 4000 Page Views to over 16,000 in a single day.

I became aware of and posted the television trailer for The Phantom (2010) on November 5, 2009. I decided to post this television trailer on one of my websites because I knew The Phantom had a long history across comic books, television, and film and therefore had a large fan base. I labeled it: The Phantom (2010) Television Trailer with the year it would air in the U.S. as one of its title tags because of the wealth of other Phantom movies and television shows out there. That post started getting 4o to 50 page views a day after having been posted for some time. I was later able to view a copy of The Phantom (2010), a two part mini-series,  months before it aired in the U.S. After I watched the mini-series, I sat down and wrote two TV reviews for it, one review for the first half titled TV Review: The Phantom (2010): Part 1 and one for the second, TV Review: The Phantom (2010): Part 2. This seemed appropriate since the mini-series was in two parts. I also did this because if there was a lot of search engine traffic for The Phantom (2010), having two reviews posted would potentially mean double the search engine traffic for relevant searches.

As the air date for The Phantom (2010) started approaching (Sunday, June 20, 2010 @ 9PM EST), the daily page views for its television trailer I had posted began going up. On the Sunday of its premiere on the SyFy Channel, the trailer received nearly 600 page views. That was not the great part. The great part was that people were beginning to search for reviews of the new mini-series as well.

My Phantom reviews had languished with very few page views up to that point. Since my reviews were the only ones, or nearly the only ones, posted online, I got and continue to get a lot search engine traffic because of them. If you don’t believe me, type The Phantom 2010 Review into Google right now and see which website shows up first in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

Bittorrent sites – the ones that post trailers and reviews with their torrent posts – also were linking to my trailer and my reviews. Forums began linking to the trailer and reviews as well. In a word, my three The Phantom (2010) posts had gone viral.

And you know what, I was almost ready for the traffic onslaught. I had the WordPress Related Posts plugin installed (I talked about that here) so site visitors could find other relevant The Phantom (2010) articles. I also went one step further and edited the bottom of the trailer post with the direct links to the two reviews (just in case, right above the trailer box itself). I hyperlinked the actors names in the posts to their tags on the site. I also linked to Phantom products on Amazon within the trailer post, as I talked about previous incarnation of the character in media available for purchase on that site. I had Google Adsense ads and other affiliate ads flanking my Phantom posts top, right (sidebar profit), and bottom.

I had typed in as many tag combination as I could think of that someone would type into a search engine to find The Phantom (2010) Television Trailer or reviews for the mini-series. Turns out I was right. Many of those tags were used by people in their searches. Remember when we spoke about proper keywords tags, their importance, and hammering search engine terms?

I had switched website host to a provider that could held a spike in traffic and deal with it efficiently without any down time (HostGator), unlike Bluefur and HostICan. I spoke about both of those hosts in these two posts here and here.

I had Google Analytics and the WordPress.com Stats plugin (discussed here, pictured in this post) installed so I could accurately chart the traffic.

I also dropped a few links here and there on appropriate posts on other people’s websites letting them and their site visitors know that I had The Phantom (2010) reviews and its trailer available for viewing.

Here is where I wasn’t ready for the increased traffic: my Email Subscription option. It was giving me trouble and people could not sign up. They began emailing me to ask for the link to sign up for Email Subscriptions. I was more than happy to comply but how many people got frustrated and didn’t even email me? This traffic deluge served to illuminate a hole in my subscription methodology. It also showed that I had been losing potential subscribers for some time. Do not ever let this happen to you. Check your subscription options, all of them. Make sure they are all functioning properly. Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity – Seneca

Because of this spike in traffic, which increased, Sunday to Monday to Tuesday (June 22, 2010), home page hits for the site increased by a factor of four. I was already posting two to three times a day (the 5-11-4 Rule) on the site but now I made sure to post popular, mainstream items instead of art house or lesser known items that I might have. This traffic will not last forever so quickly cultivating new fans is crucial.

Conclusion

This traffic has been a great ride but it will eventually tapper off and end but there will also be residuals if properly leveraged: new subscribers via Email, RSS, Facebook, Twitter and more regulars visitors to the home page.

What do you think about this traffic spike? Are you prepared for your own? Having you ever accurately prophesied a film or TV topic in the form of a post that brought in a ton of traffic? Please share below. In any case, I have the concluding parts of the Movie Website In-Text Advertising series coming soon as well as Amazon Associate tips. Subscribe here so you don’t miss out.

You should also follow me on Twitter as well (my goal is to get to 100 followers by August).

Got something to say? Talk below.

Google offers a Keyword Tool that lets you see how many people are searching for a particular keyword. This is a very good strategy for choosing keywords to use but most people overlook the one that is even better. What you should be asking yourself and looking for are search engine terms (keywords) that will be hot (e.g. searched for heavily) down the road.

How to Hammer Search Engine Terms

1.) Fore-Thought

If you know a movie and/or its stars are going to be very popular down the road, do a series of posts on them before anybody else does. Make your site ready for people searching for those terms on the Internet in advance. When people search for those terms, your site will get hits. I posted The Phantom (2010) television trailer for the upcoming mini-series months before it aired. Now that the series has aired in other parts of the world and is about to air here in the U.S., I am receiving a lot of search engine traffic because it.

2.) The Title

Place the search engine terms in the title of your post. When you search for something in a search engine what do you see? The keywords you searched for are in bold either in the title or the upper part of the articles in the SERPs right? A website owner I know practically dominates the keywords: Kristen Stewart, Taylor Lautner, and Robert Pattinson, using all four methods I have outlined here but mostly this one and the next two in his posts. Instead of “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse Trailer” he writes “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse Trailer (1m30s) – Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart”.

This word choice also has to do with garnering attention in certain traffic avenues but the collateral result is the same. He places popular and high yield search engine terms in the titles of the posts but cautions about over-saturation.

if webmasters overstuff their titles with keywords — but don’t work  on the rest (post quality, new material, make sure the text is *about*  the title keywords, consider that the “value” of each keyword will be  reduced the longer the post gets) there’s a good chance that tactic may  backfire. If  the post title has a lot of words “THE TWILIGHT SAGA: ECLIPSE TRAILER  1M30S – ROBERT PATTINSON, KRISTEN STEWART” (total: 10 words) each single  word will have LESS value. In other words, the briefer the post [title] (but no  less than 3 or 4 words, I’d say) the stronger the value of  EACH WORD  for the search engines.

The internet is one big traffic contest and the person or site that hammers search engine terms properly and frequently will receive the prize.

Make sure that title tags of your post actually match the post’s content. Do not mislead or try to trick the reader with attractive title tags then giving them no payoff with they decide to read your post. Make sure the title tags match the content. If you do not, you may be flagged by Google and other search engines as a spammer. Do I really need to tell you that your content also should have something to say and not be inane blathering?

3.) The First Line

Place the search engine terms you are targeting in the first line of your post and make sure they are bold. I spoke of this technique previously in these posts: Keyword Placement for High SERPs (Search Engine Result Positions),  Movie Review Writing Strategies.

4.) Tags

Placing the search engine terms in the tags for the post you are writing is a no-brainer but needs to be said for thoroughness sake. I spoke of this earlier here: Proper Keywords and Tags to Maximize Google AdSense Ads. Tags are one of the factors that help search engines to identify the right content to display for specific search engine term queries.

Just as Vaynerchuk says to Crush It! in regards to branding oneself, I say Hammer It! in regards to search engine terms. For many terms and keywords you have a limited time period before everyone else jumps on the band wagon so you must act quickly and when you do, hammer it.