I’ve written several posts about the importance of good content and the power of getting your site accepted into Google News. In fact, I wrote a detailed post about how to get your site submitted here. Not every site is a good fit for this strategy, but if your site has a theme that naturally posts a lot of content, especially news content, then Google News might be right for you. We were in the process of getting websitehosting.com submitted to Google News before we sold it, but none of our other sites really had the breadth of content needed; that is until we purchased ira.com.
We’ve been writing an average of 2-3 posts per day on IRA.com since we purchased it; about 2.5 weeks ago I decided it was time to submit it to Google News. Then, yesterday, I got the most wonderful email:
“Thank you for your note. We’ve reviewed your site and will be adding it to our index for Google News. In order for your content to be included in Google News, please follow at least one of the two options below:”
To say the least, I was really happy and excited to get approved. We put a lot of work into this project over the past couple of months and getting accepted to Google News is going to bring a welcome increase in traffic. I estimate that we can get at least an additional 1,000 unique visitors to the site each day. Not only will this traffic undoubtedly translate into more sales, it will also attract more natural links. We’ve had sites in Google News before and several of our articles got links just from the exposure there.
I plan on making a followup post in about a month to document the increase in traffic we see. In the mean time we are going to ramp up our content efforts even more moving forward. It will be some trial and error to see what kind of articles attract the most attention, but I hope to have a good handle on that within a month.
Hometown: Fairfax, VA
{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
Very nice, always a good feeling and I know from experience how picky Google News Reviews can be. I’ve had a couple sites accepted into Gnews, always helps with the selling price as well
Glad to see everything is going great for you guys!
Congratulations Mike, will be waiting for the follow-up
Congratulation on getting in Google News!
I wanted to ask about the writers: how do you find them and how you are agreed to pay them. Would like to know the average rates if it’s not a secret or at least some hint.
I am working more with writers from freelance.com but they usually produce low quality rewritten articles no matter how much they ask for the article, but I would love to move on to higher quality.
Thanks in advance!
Mike,
Whatever you do, don’t use writers on freelance.com. You’re just going to end up with lower quality crap that won’t get approved in Google News.
Feel free to ping me via email and I’ll be happy to answer all your other questions.
Mike
Congratulations Mike! Great domain and excellent process you’re following – looking forward to watching the evolution of the site. Not many better 3L .COM’s out there and I couldn’t think of better hands for it to land in!
Thank you very much Morgan!
Congrats!
Thanks very much Jason.
Hey Mike, any info on that follow-up? Would be great to see some stats
I finally posted a follow up yesterday. Let me know if you have any questions.
Hi Mike, any updates on how well the site is doing, any estimates as to when you break even on your investment into the domain name?
Things are going reasonably well with it. As traffic continues to grow, so do the signups. We’re also heading to the heart of the IRA season, which should be fun!
Mike you have a typo here http://www.ira.com/savings on the credit card section. Feel free to delete this comment after reading.
Thanks for the heads up… I just fixed that. No need to delete the comment, these things happen. Thanks for pointing it out.