On April 29, 2010 a broadcast of the Royal Wedding Live will happen and you can catch it at royalweddinglive.com. They will be streaming the YouTube connection during the event.
Davenport, Iowa entrepreneur Brad Zude purchased the domain name on November 23, 2010 and developed a WordPress site with content featuring Prince William and Kate Middleton leading up to the Royal Wedding.
Zude believes that the site will produce 10 million or more hits according to his post on the Shark Tank message board. He is soliciting advertisers for royalweddinglive.com. That’s quite a claim to fulfill, but may be a great opportunity depending on what he’s demanding and his ability to document traffic.
I did a Google search for the term, “Royal Wedding Live” and found his site at the number one search position, right under the news section. That’s impressive and leads me to believe he will generate significant traffic over the next week.
He’s even managed to outrank Mashable’s story on the Royal Wedding being aired live on YouTube.
Still, it appears that Zude has missed what likely has the largest potential for return. He has no option to sign up for a newsletter. He could sign up with a tool such as AWeber and have this in place within a few hours.
By creating a newsletter, he could keep in contact with Royal Wedding fans, giving them updates on the couple. This creates more opportunity to drive traffic back to the site after the wedding.
He would also be able to monetize the newsletter as well. I’m sure that this would be a great group of people to market to. I hope he makes the move, or he’s going to miss out.
Zude should also be reviewing the terms of his hosting agreement. Most companies set a limit on how many connections a site can have at a single time. If he’s exhausted those connections, new traffic will not get through.
Even worse, many companies have a monthly allotted data transfer. If the burst of traffic exceeds his allotment, his site will shut down completely. This can be avoided by making sure the hosting plan allows for burstable activity. It might cost him more, but if he’s sold enough advertising, he should be fine.
I’m looking forward to seeing if he gets the traffic he thinks he will and if his site is able to handle it.