Everyday there is a breaking news story, celebrity drama, or an amazing sports play. As an internet marketer or blogger, it is not only important to follow current events in the media, but know how to capitalize on the buzz created by the story as it relates to your internet properties.

If you own a celebrity gossip blog, you need to know each and every time Britney Spears checks into rehab or gets into a physical altercation with her mother and capitalize on the traffic.

However, it is not only the direct connections to the story that are important, but the indirect connections. Perhaps you sell flood insurance and the Mississippi river floods St. Louis. How do you capitalize on the media buzz?

Follow the traffic!

If the Perez Hilton celebrity gossip blog breaks an exclusive story on Spears, make a comment on the blog that adds value to the website, then leave a link back to a related article on your blog. On your website, you may choose to post about the same story but put your personality into the story and add value to the news. Make both your blog and your view on the event worth reading! Give the reader a reason to come back.

Your websites will not only benefit from increased page views and unique visitors, but also from the resulting incoming backlinks to your blog. In the long run these backlinks will prove to be extremely valuable as you continue to add more content to your websites that you wish to rank highly for in the search engine results.

It is a simple process: follow the buzz surrounding a story by identifying highly trafficked websites reporting on a popular story, add quality comments to these sites connecting the story to an article on your website, and link back to your blog post.

I often use Technorati to follow the buzz. If you do a search for a story in the media, in the results you can see the “authority” that a particular website has. The higher the authority (the term they use for backlinks), often the more traffic the website receives.

I can guarantee that this method will increase traffic to your blog. The trick lies in making the traffic stick and obtaining backlinks! If you write original, highly unique content that is worth coming back to read over and over again, you will be successful at gaining backlinks that will help secure long-term traffic.