Are The Early Search Result Listings Essential?

After reading a great post about blog strategies that will increase your affiliate referrals, I immediately recognized in that post few things that have been happening here on my blog.

Here is what Maki wrote:

1. Early Search Result Listings are Essential – Get Ranked Fast.
Being one of the first few people to write about a specific website or affiliate scheme will allow you to easily get ranked within the top 10 for most search engines. This is because there is very little competition for the specific term or keyphrase.

While in my case this strategy hardly resulted in any affiliate referrals or sales, I certainly saw somewhat unusual traffic to my post about Google’s directions from New York to London. I am certain that I was not the first to write about it, but somewhere among the first. Below are statistics from Hittail statistics of keyword/keyphrases used to find the above mentioned post today:

new york to london (13 visits)
directions from ny to london (8 visits)
directions new york to london (8 visits)
directions from nyc to london (5 visits)
directions newyork to london (3 visits)
google new york london (3 visits)
google new york to london (3 visits)
new york to london directions (3 visits)
directions from newyork to london (2 visits)
directions london to new york (2 visits)
google directions new york london (2 visits)

I realize that above statistics may not impress everyone, but for me this is quiet unusual. This traffic is not a result of incoming links, as far as I know there is only one link from another blog pointing to that post out there, besides the fact that post was dugged and bumped a few times. The only conclusion that I can make is that I was indeed among the first people to write on the subject. Interestingly enough the post hardly has any content. Unfrtunately this was purely accidental, and I have not seen any sales from this traffic, and probably never will. But the technique is there, right?

If anything, to me this is a confirmation of Maki #1 strategy. I highly recommend subscribing to DoshDosh for other great ideas and insights.