I’m preparing a presentation on ‘Finding Readers for your Blog’ which I’ll be giving at the Melbourne Blog Training Day next Tuesday.
It’s got me thinking back to some of the bigger days of traffic that I’ve had on my own blogs over the years and I thought I’d open up some discussion on the topic to see if we can identify any trends.
What was your biggest day of Traffic (or ‘days’ if you can think of more than one) and what happened to make them occur?
I asked this on Twitter yesterday and it was interesting to see the responses. Some of the reasons giving included:
- controversial posts
- creative posts
- random links from bigger sites
- social bookmarking events (getting popular on Digg or Delicious)
- ranking high for terms in Google around big news events
- breaking a scoop news story
I’m sure we’ll see some of these themes in your experiences but know that there will be other themes too.
For me there have been many bigger than normal days over the last 8 years. Two that spring to mind include:
- My Six Figure Blogging Moment – I had been blogging for a while and suddenly realised that I was on track for over $100,000 in a year earnings from my blogs. The first time I mentioned it was in an interview that I did. I didn’t really think about the implications of talking about it at the time but that interview went viral – as did my followup post. What kicked it all off was a mention on Slashdot (which at the time was equivalent to getting on the front page of Digg).
- Front page of Yahoo (sort of) – then there was the day that a post on my photography blog was featured by one of Yahoo’s tech blogs. That in itself didn’t sent much traffic but when that particular Yahoo blog’s post was featured on the front page of Yahoo for 4-5 hours one day I saw traffic hit my blog like I’ve never seen traffic before or since. I don’t remember the exact numbers but I saw more traffic from that 4-5 hours than I’d normally see in a week of traffic.
So now it’s over to you. What Was Your Biggest Traffic Day and Why did it Happen?
My biggest traffic happened when one of my document got featured on scribe. That was real fun!
Hey Darren,
I look back and my biggest traffic day has to be when one of my blog post got featured on a huge article directory. I couldn’t believe all the traffic I was receiving for that day and several days after. Looking forward to what others have to say.
Chat with you later…
Josh
Hey Darren,
My Biggest Traffic day when my articles get high votes in social bookmarking sites or get featured on other blogs.
I think if you write killer content then there is more chance to get featured on other blogs/sites/directories.
Thanks :).
~Dev
Unfortunately my BIGGEST traffic day was due to a silly picture that I used for a particular post. I was Tweeted across the internet like crazy and I got 1,000 new visitors. However, they only came for the picture and not the content, so it wasn’t worth much.
As far as qualified traffic goes, I have had great success with tying my small business blog content with a current event. I try not to use that technique too often, however, because it will lose its magic.
This week is my blog’s 1st birthday week, so I’m trying a totally different promotional approach instead. I will report back if it works.
-Joshua Black
The Underdog Millionaire.
Hi Darren! While I’m no super blogger, one of my biggest blog posts was also a list of other sites/blogs (like Dev, above). I listed all resources for intranet. Received about 100 hits in two days (a lot for my average dozen visits).
But that one was beat by a simple “5 ways to use Yammer.” Any headline with the “six steps” or “10 ways” etc. gets a lot of traffic!
Good luck in your search.
Valerie
Well, darren. My biggest traffic ever was of 102 visit to one of my killer articles. I know its not to high, but still good for just a month old blog.
Thanks…..:)
Divya…….
My biggest traffic day was the day that Leo linked (in his ‘links’ section) to one of my guest posts on another blog. The guest post ended up being (and still is) the most popular post on the host blog, and my traffic went through the roof. It was my virgin guest post too–how will I ever top that? Well, I can think of one way, but I’ll have to come up with something pretty stellar to pull it off :)
My busiest days were a list of green holiday gifts, a list of books that the BBC said everyone should have read (and commenting on which I had and had not read), and a review of a summer beer. I can figure out why the first two spiked but not the beer. I had been averaging a steady number of readers and suddenly last week – boom – a huge drop. I’m not sure what happened or if it’s WordPress’ measurement too, but I’d love to know how to get them back!
Thanks!
-Jen
May 4, 2010 when I released a very silly video of my shoes dancing with boomwhackers playing to the tune of I Gotta Feelin’.
I produced the video to show my readers how I use boomwhackers at a camp for kids whose parents have cancer.
Hee hee: http://tinyurl.com/274m8zl
My biggest traffic day came on a day when I was linked by a high traffic tech site for a “how-to” type article on how to watch streaming video via your xbox or playstation – in order to save money. It continued for a day or two while my article was linked on the front page, then died down a ton – although i still get regular traffic to that post.
My biggest traffic day was when I publish the first pics of the first Brazilian Air Force Mi-35M attack helicopter, at the plant yet ( http://vootatico.com.br/archives/2717 ).
So far my biggest single day was having the “Candy The Magic Dinosaur” series featured on Weebls Stuff with over 5,000 unique visitors in a day!…
That was exciting!…
;]
April 10-15 every year. I write about taxes. :)
My biggest traffic day was when one of my article written on Swine flu and Ayurveda got its way on the top page of Google. I really had a good number of clicks to that page for at least for 3 months during those days.
Hope to write more on the same lines
A few days ago, it was Friday. I usually submit a few interesting filmmaking links that I have found during the week. This time I renamed the series and was much more intentional about my thoughts on the links.
The result: a > 22% increase over my last peak and > 300% over my average per day.
awesome – wich I could maintain that every day.
Actually I’ll trade the increase for 10 comments more per day :)
Hey Darren,
Great insight into your spikes in traffic.
My traffic is directly proportionate to the amount of effort I put into it.
I have had no spikes in traffic yet.
Kindest,
Nabeel
My wife’s (Kelly Eddington) biggest traffic day occurred just last Sunday when Roger Ebert tweeted about her site. In one of his tweets, he had mentioned that when he watches movies, he noticed that no one has movie critic books on their bookshelves. My wife, who paints watercolor portraits, had just completed one of a little girl whose parents had one of Roger Ebert’s books on the shelf behind her. Kelly was a member of the Ebert Club, so she sent a message and a link to Roger about the painting. Turns out he’s a student of watercolorists, and he admired Kelly’s work. He replied on the club, citing her “technical mastery,” then, to our amazement, tweeted to his 185,000 followers about her site.
Later in the day, Kelly wrote up the story about what had happened on her personal blog, and Roger tweeted about that article as well, so we saw wonderful traffic spikes on both her sites. Good way to spend a Sunday:)
On my warcraft gold blog http://www.justmytwocopper.org I wrote about the best location to do an activity in the game world and had a 17k traffic spike from the #1 wow site which aol hosts called wow.com.
Basically, if you want a traffic spike you have to get great content and connect with the people around you.
My biggest traffic day was actually a few weeks ago when one of my blog posts when hot on StumbleUpon.
It was definitely a post about Controversy titled “8 Greyhat Tactics SEOs Are Using, Use at Your Own Discretion!”.
The post covered a lot of topics there were of great discussion, so I actually got a lot of negative comments because of the fact that I talked about many greyhat tactics that SEO were using. Either way, it made a lot of buzz.
For me its the two times a year that national school results are announced in Kenya – and thousands of parents flock to the internet to search for their kids or relatives results which are posted online, with many of them landing on an obscure brief blog post i did 4 years ago
Hey Darren,
my biggest traffic day so far has been my first “How to-“-video I shot with a screen capture software. People were amazed of the idea.
Thanks for asking the question.
Take care
Oliver
Mine came when I submitted an image to Awkward Family Photos (http://awkwardfamilyphotos.com/2010/05/26/toilet-built-for-two/) and got it posted with a link back to my website.
That link lead to a major spike on the day it was posted, and a very big increase in traffic for about a month afterwards.
My biggest traffic day was when a guest post on a blog got noticed by a much, much bigger blog that disagreed with much of what the blog I was posting at had to offer. It did seem like the much bigger blog really liked my approach to things, though – they not only linked to my guest post, but they went right to my blog itself and linked that.
Mine was when the Wall St Journal did a feature on my blog (amongst others).
My Chile blog was featured in that country’s most popular newspaper. Despite people having to type in my URL manually (there was no web link from the newspaper’s site), traffic was three to four times my normal daily traffic.
The traffic spiked the day the article was published and then quickly died down the next day. However, the news generated so much traffic that I had to buy extra bandwidth from my hosting company that month.
Darren,
My biggest traffic day was during the World Cup. Had more hits that day then the entire time before. Just wish I could somehow do it agian or at least half that number.
Thanks for all the advice. Maybe a post about how to get over the PLATEAU?
My biggest day of traffic was actually just a few days ago when I wrote about how 3 famous authors collectively made more money than some famous Movie stars and made it to the 100 celebrity list on Forbes magazine. http://www.wilsonusman.com/famous-authors
My biggest traffic day was just last week. I wrote a list post, following your 31DBBB suggestions. It was 10 reasons why you shouldn’t drink pop. Pop/soda drinkers are a passionate group and I was terrified that I would offend them. I presented my points and then asked for honest opinions about why readers enjoyed pop.
I was blown away by the response.
Highest number of hits for me and most number of click throughs on Twitter and highest number of comments. Readers retweeted and emailed to friends.
I felt a lot of pressure the next day to keep up the momentum but decided to go with the post I had scheduled even if it wouldn’t be as popular.
The experience taught me that steady growth is how I want my blog to grow.
My highest traffic day was actually one where I basically just linked to Copyblogger’s post about James Chartrand being a woman.
The linkback from Copyblogger brought in over 600 UVs. Now, to some of you, that might sound like nothing… but at the time I was averaging 80ish a day. Unfortunately , I did not harness (mainly as it was unexpected) the rise in hits.
mine was when I published the post 21 Test Management Tools Reviewed…..this post got maximum pageviews and in-turn maximum profit.
Great question and topic.
My biggest Traffic Day came with my “Lady Gaga’s 8-Point Guide to Larger than Life Blogging” post.
http://bit.ly/byh1xY
This was what I call a “Pop Culture Mashup” that takes an iconic topic or event and connects the dots with social media.
It generated almost 1,000 visits in about 12 hours. This was due to some fantastic generosity from Brian Clark, Amber Cadabra, Chris Guillebeau and others.
My biggest day came from being mentioned on a legacy blog as part of a blogging group event. This resulted in being mentioned on several other blogs. I still have followers that came from that event.
My biggest traffic day was after a blog post called: “A Living Social Media Case Study – US Airways – Are they listening?” I’ve since moved it over to my new URL so the comments are missing unfortunately.
I had a bad experience on US Airways and I wanted to see if they’d answer the “social phone.” They did but only after my blog got like 300 hits or so and a number of comments. Apparently others have had bad US Airways experiences.
US Airways reached out to my wife, got in contact with me and gave us some coupons. I also made sure they reached out to the other commenters.
Hi Darren….
My biggest peak on traffic on one day was when a celebrity of which I talk in my blog, send a link to his followers on Tweeter. There was six times my regular traffic that day! (Of course, I think it helped that SHE offered me a giveaway of one e-book to my readers too… It’s still alive and is at this post). Advice: Get a celebrity endorsement, even if it’s circumstantial.
On my other blog, the biggest traffic day was when I talk about Paul The Octopuss, and an automatic twitter search box put it on the main page of a big Newspaper, even if it goes on rotation for only 10-15 minutes, it sets a record I can’t break yet! Advice: Remember to use #Hashtags when promoting your posts on Twitter!
I hope this was useful to your presentation.
Saludos,
Gonzalo.
One of my most successful posts was breaking news — the obituary of a beloved blogger. It still gets hits. That kind of success isn’t easily recreated without causing rather unpleasant side-effects.
It was recently, when a TV show televised a photo of a horrific accident of a friend of mine. I had posted the information on this accident last year. For the next 3 days, my blogs hits to the articles that I posted were 150x my daily average.
It is a shame it was caused by this terrible event, but it was great to see the heartfelt concern of the public.
No biggest traffic yet. still around 30-50 per day in two blogs that I maintain. Not sure why but perhaps particularly because it’s not in english. Any tricks to get a big traffic for non-english blogs?
Darren,
My biggest traffic day came last Friday when, just like you, I got a mention in an article that made the featured slot all day on the front page of MSN. More than 30,0000 hits in the course of a few hours.
That was pretty wild and a lot of fun, but keeping up with it all kind of wore me out. I’m actually happy that it’s a bit quieter for the moment.
I think probably the biggest day’s / spikes for me have been double whammy’s, where a post gets onto HackerNews, and in turn the home page of Delicious. One particularly pleasant incident occurred when this happened, and then a secondary (linked) post also climbed the next day to the Delicious Homepage – then another wave of links as a result kept it going all week with tweets.
I’ve seen other chain effects like this where a tweet from an influencer drives delicious saves driving links driving good organic positions. Really, the secret seems to be getting good content in front of the right people.
Great topic(o:
My biggest day and spike in traffic came when I posted my “Vegan Beginner’s Guide”. It ranks #1 on Google. It was stumbled, linked and shared on Facebook.
I think the reason it was and is so popular is because people are shifting to more conscious dietary choice. Not necessarily vegan but just a healthier lifestyle.
My biggest day was when Boing Boing linked to an article I published, and traffic went up about 1000% for the next week or so.
One of my posts went Viral on reddit. I was actually really surprised on how much traffic it sent.
Apart from that I have maintained a steady traffic level.
I’m still really new to blogging, but I had my biggest traffic day yesterday (Sunday), double my usual traffic. But Saturday was basically nonexistent. I haven’t really traced a rationale yet, maybe just the nature of newer blog sites.
My biggest traffic day was when my photo was published on the front page of a very popular photography blog as a demonstration. I saw a 500% increase for several days of traffic!
My biggest traffic day was courtesy of Yahoo and Bankrate, and without a live link to my site! All type-ins and Google traffic. Amazing to me how many people will Google a clear dot com domain name just because it isn’t a link, but that’s reality.
It hit 60,000 viewers by 10 am my time that day, then my poor, unprepared shared server shut me down to protect the other sites. Took all day to get the DNS to propagate to the dedicated server I got to take care of things temporarily. Next day traffic was well over 100,000.
The article was one I had been interviewed for a few months before, and had pretty much given up on hearing about it being published. Naturally it came just after I had moved, and just 3 days after I had gotten my internet connection in my new home. I almost missed it entirely!
My big traffic days almost always come when someone in the mainstream media has written something ridiculous and I write a rational, but somewhat ranting, response to it.
If the post is about breastfeeding, there are a couple of facebook pages with a lot of fans that tend to share them, and then they get shared from there around facebook. In the past 6 months or so, I can almost always credit facebook shares for high traffic days.
I had written a post on a trending topic that included plenty of references. Most of my traffic came from social networking sites because so many people bookmarked my post for me.
The biggest spike in traffic I had when I analyzed wheter a guy who won 1M USD in an online poker tournament was just lucky or if he really was a great player.
That post got linked by someone in a very popular poker forum. This more than tripled my traffic for two days.
My biggest traffic day was yesterday at 45 visitors and I don’t know why, I’m thinking it’s from commenting on blogs like this, so thank you lol but 45 visitors is still pathetic I think…does anyone have a blog that is just starting out that would like to exchange links on each others blog roll…email me on my blog if interested, there’s also a link to my facebook on my blog as well.
Writing good content that I’m proud of helps but what brings on the hits is the time and effort I put into getting it out ‘there’. If I’m lucky and have posted on my site, my facebook page, twitter and some on-line forums that relate to brewing beer I am pretty happy when I achieve 100 unique hits. Not a lot of notice but enough to keep me motivated.
P.S. I’ve earned $43.56 since I started blogging, obviously not into it for the money but it was still rewarding to receive a couple checks from my affilates.
Thanks for all helpful tips Darren.
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