The very first time I had ever experienced this phenomena online was in December of 1996. In those way-back days, I ran a site focused on selling Christian t-shirts. Back then, I had posted Christian based poetry on my website to draw traffic to the domain. Over the two days leading up to Christmas and the two days following Christmas, I had served as much traffic as I had in the previous nine months of existence!
Fast-forward to April 15th, 2004. I currently have more than one dozen articles on my website dealing with 401k retirement funds and 401k tax issues. These articles are the third most frequented topic on my site as the traffic is generated from the search engines. Beginning on April 12th, my site traffic started to climb beyond its average level. It then peaked on April 15th. Of course, the vast majority of this traffic was visiting my site to find my tax related content.
Although the traffic to these tax resources comes from many sites beyond just the search engines, as many people have linked to these articles, one site in particular is the tax related site for one of my article distribution clients. My client had decided to leave his articles off of his site, and to link to his articles on my domain. Between April 12th and April 15th, my site received 448 unique visitors from my client's domain alone. (http://www.investsafe.com/articles.html) On the 15th, my site served 90% more visitors than is average on any given day.
So the lesson I have learned here is that if I have date targeted materials on my site for several different dates, that I can actually draw more people to my site during these peak time periods. While the time dated traffic may not generate immediate sales, it will allow me to garner more recognition in the marketplace. Over the long haul, this extra recognition serves to generate more referral traffic that has proven to be the basis of my business model. 95% of all of my clients have come to me directly by referral.