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?
