Reader Questions for the weekend:
- When was your biggest day of traffic?
- Where did the traffic come from?
- What (if anything) did you do in order for it to happen?
Leave your answers in comments below or write a post about it on your blog and leave a comment here with a link to it.
My biggest day for traffic was, strangely, a Sunday. I was featured on BBC Radio Wales about blogging (you can here it here).I really didn’t do anything to make it happen, I was asked to be interviewed about Welsh Bloggers, and I was there or therabouts for Google. It was a odd experience (going to the studio), but it’s amazing the traffic I got from it.
It’s not my biggest referrer ever (I’m on the Technorati Developers page, that sends me 100/200 visitors per day), but for a period of 2 weeks I got serious traffic from the BBC site.
May 4th — my post on home office isolation was featured on Lifehacker. I’m not sure how Lifehacker found me.
Reddit – of course it was the one more jokey article that wasn’t totally representative of my site’s content.
My biggest day so far was in fact the day I was featured on the Problogger Group Writing Project (Top 5 Lists).
Major spike in my stats….
I recently tried writing a Social Bookmarking targeted article. I received a ton of hits (relative to the small size of my site), but the benefits were mixed. I worte an article on the experience, which can be found at http://twowheelsoapbox.com/?p=24
My biggest day of traffic was when I posted a story about how I found out about my ex-wife’s death by reading a novel by Amy Tan. It did really well on reddit.com. The next best day was when I did a review off John Chow’s site.
It was 21 november 2006, I created a Google Maps Mashup for the Dutch general elections (http://millionpieces.nl/stemlocatiesamsterdam/). One of the major Dutch news sites (http://www.nu.nl/) wrote about it and linked to the mashup.
I was frontpaged to Digg after I posted a blog about “hidden stuff” in company logos. It was actually really suprising: all I did was submit it to Digg.
Also, I would recommend that you have some method to deal with high traffic *before* you get that traffic. As in, right now.
When I post video to metacafe about installation process of pfsense, firewall based FreeBSD 6.2. pfsense author found it and link it to their page. But still major source (90%) come from search engine.
First big day: Monaco Grand Prix 2006 – Schumacher caused controversy, and because the decisions were being made outside of normal television broadcast times, more people were on the net searching for answers.
Most recent big day: Monaco Grand Prix 2007 – Lots of controversy again. Gotta love F1 when it gets crazy!
Oh, and Darren once linked out to me, which was a pretty special moment, and quite a big day. :-)
My Hot-or-Not Admin Panel WordPress plugin, which I posted July 22, less than a month after starting my first blog.
I did a piece on blog activism. I wrote about Nigeria, and it made it to the BBC home page. I got over 50 times the traffic I normally get.
My biggest day was nothing to really celebrate.
My blog is China focused, and on Apr 17 I posted about the Virginia Tech shootings— because for non-Chinese living in China, sometimes it takes a while to access news.
I wanted to make sure that everyone was aware, especially Americans who might have friends or family that they might be worried about.
Add the that the early (erroneous) reports that the shooter was Chinese, and it ended up bringing a lot of traffic to the site that day.
But needless to say, that’s an article that I wish I had never had to write…
May 11th of this year. Traffic from digg and lifehacker. I did nothing. I was wondering when I’d break my previous record, which was Sept 28th of last year (a combo of digg, lifehacker, downloadsquad and a few others).
I have two days with most traffic. First was when I was ranked on MyBlogLog as one of the “6 Hottest Blog Communities” on April 17th and the other was the day I posted about Viralink with my Viral Linking post
It was the day after a very powerful typhoon hit my country, the Philippines. Power and internet was down in most parts of the city. I was fortunate to be one of the first blogger to post photos of the devastation. The leading national daily, Philippine Inquirer picked up my blog entry and posted it on their online site, the inquirer.net.
Around mid-June … I was linked my LifeHacker. ;)
My biggest single-day traffic was in September 2006. The traffic came thanks to participation in a problogger.net group writing contest! I am still getting good traffic on that post too.
My biggest period of sustained traffic was in December. I ran a month-long series titled “Christmas Rediscovered” that generated some nice traffic.
When two of my submissions were accepted in Slashdot within 3 days, there was a lot of traffic to my blog.
Yesterday… Though does it still count if my blog has only been up for two days ;) … yea, i think it still does… hey, if you want to make today even better… check it out ;)
Great post … I’m surprised at how much traffic LifeHacker sends to people and how that traffic seems to be more “valuable” than Digg traffic.
My biggest days have been when I released technical “scoops” on new products. My second biggest day was when I posted about potential Digg improvements and one of their staff circulated the link within their organization.
group writing project and a bit of help from stumbleupon
Around mid-March 2007 during the Cricket World Cup. A flood of visitors from search engines looking for free streaming cricket telecast. I had made a post listing all the different options that had worked for me.
22nd May ’07 was my best, I posted a slideshow of photos of a special edition Ayrton Senna kart and Australia’s biggest karting news site linked to it. I think I actually got more traffic the day before but I went messing with my stats and don’t know.
I’ve found that the wonderfully well-crafted opinion pieces, photos, reviews and how-tos don’t ever bring in traffic. Scandalous news, amateur photos, last-minute April Fools and anything that catches the imagination do, no matter how objectively good they are. But does the quality stuff bring in more repeat visitors and steady streams of traffic? I believe so.
However, neither group make me any (direct) money! I think the visitors that click on my ads are the people interested in leisure karting (I write about the professional stuff) who have wandered into my site by accident. I’m not interested in writing about 30mph corporate karting so I have to look on my blog as beer money plus exposure for my services for the industry: design, journalism, PR.
April 15th of this year. I’ve been writing about Saturday Night Live pretty consistently since last fall, and those posts have been ranking well in Google search results. On April 14th, I wrote this post and ended up getting a ton (relatively speaking) of traffic, virtually all of it from Google search.
I’ve found that sticking to a few key topics and writing about them regularly helps me rank fairly well in Google’s index, on those posts, at least.
It’s not a good idea to bank on Google traffic, though, because that can come and go depending on a lot of different variables.
The day I released a custom version of a WP theme.
Yesterday actually lol.
The theme page : http://zaldoe.com/themes
Today’ll mostly my highest, thanks to ProBlogger :D
This is a good question. All of the answers posted here demonstrate that you just don’t know where your influence will penetrate for big traffic on any given day. We focus on the marketing discipline of branding on our blog. Big traffic days have come from two directions, – the obvious sources…
Typepad Blog Featured Blog
Google News
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Washington Post
And the not so obvious – Intranets…
General Motors Intranet – 2 days of 6000+ traffic from a post on the auto dealer industry
Unilever Intranet – A post using a brand of theirs as an example
Bridal Industry Intranet – A post on Colors & Branding
Most unusual source with high traffic…
Aviation Week – Applying a branding post to flight
In all of these cases a meaningful and relevant post triggered the high traffic. The big takeaway here is to focus on one subject and be great at it. It will magnetize your blog.
Derrick
My biggest day of traffic was when I published the lyrics to “This is my now” by Jordin Sparks before anyone else. The Huffington Post linked to the article. That was pretty cool, I got 1,000 visits in one day. I was happy.
On May 26th I did live coverage of a UFC PPV and it was still my biggest traffic day despite crashing just 2 hours into the 5 hour event. Hence, that is why I switched to dedicated hosting rather than shared hosting.
June 1st. I had one visitor!!! Yeah! I’m just starting out….
A useful list and a little help from StumbleUpon….
More details can be found
I never had a BIG traffic peak, but I always assumed that when you do well in one of the most popular social networks (or whatever you call them), your article or site starts to show everywhere.
But that’s not exactly true for Stumbleupon. I wrote an guide about Digital Makeover in Photoshop two weeks ago and it has received more than 10,000 visits from Stumbleupon and traffic keeps on coming each day, and it is featured on the BUZZ section for Photoshop tag. Even though, the article hasn’t been picked up by almost no blog.
So, it seems that Stubmleupon is some sort of an island. At least in this case.
Thanks,
Enrique
I was recently featured on G4 networks Attack of The Show as a top tech blog and I got a big boost a few months ago from StumbleUpon with a post about a Lego sofa.
The AOTS appearance was especially important because the traffic was very sticky. Fans of that show are exactly the kind of people I try to write for.
My biggest day of traffic occurred when a site I might vehemently disagree with – if I read them – linked to me, but didn’t say anything about me. I was just part of a number of links of blogs worth checking out, and it was strange, because that place sent a ton of traffic, and I wonder what they were looking for. The post up that day was a fairly dense one on Aristotle, it wasn’t me ranting or doing anything stupid or easily accessible, even. (I’ve linked to the post in case you can figure this out. They sent a lot of traffic.)
My blog gets 150 visits and 100 pageviews (its an art gallery, with next/foward buttons, thus the high views), but I was surprised to see a day I got 500 visits and 8000 pageviews… which seems excessive when I only have about 100 drawings up.
I got a review of my software on this blog entry:
http://gtd.marvelz.com/blog/2007/05/22/review-of-tudumo-gtd-software/
…and my server went nuts! So I made a beta available, figuring it was really silly to disappoint all the traffic. Had two other reviews after that, and a lot of “mindshare”.
Thanks for the blog Darren – really enjoy reading it.
I make a post about paypal scam that some scammer wanna get my id and password. After that I make a post and digg it. Wow..Then traffic come like the water from the sea come into a small town. So in short, sometime scam can make a lot of traffic too.
1. When was your biggest day of traffic?
May 24th, 2007
2. Where did the traffic come from?
http://www.winfuture.de/news,31925.html
3. What (if anything) did you do in order for it to happen?
Nothing
In last month it was the 4th of May. I am a German writer, with a writers blog, and the day before, I took part on an event in Second Life, initiiated by a writers platform. In SL we coul talk via Skypecast, and so I talked about my experiences in blogging as a writer. May 4th, there has been an article on that writers platform, with a link to my blog :-) That worked!
Another day with plenty of traffic, has ben when I wrote about a gig of a famous German band called ‘Element of Crime’. This seems to be my all-time top-post ;-)
Last week I generated more traffic than usual, with posting special writing-tipps. I make a series out of them, just as I learned it on Problogger.net ;-) AND I made a WTF out of these posts on Technorati.
http://www.autorenblog.writingwoman.de
That’s easy – taking part in the Problogger group writing project, and making sure it was a topic with “blogging” in the title.
Joanna
I made a post called 101 Essential Blogging Resources last week.
The post was Probloggered, Dugg, Stumbled, Del.icio’d to the Popular Page and Lifehackered and since then my traffic and RSS has been raised by a huge amount.
On the second of May when I was mentioned twice on Lifehacker and also on Dumb Little Man, Lifehack and various social media networks. It was a very good day :)
A few weeks ago I wrote a post called Money and Work Lessons From The Simpsons, in honor of their 400th episode. Somebody Stumbled it and caused a mini traffic tsunami. Guess people still love The Simpsons.
It was through the Top 5 blog postings from this site. I’m only starting out and only a few weeks old. It was a few weeks ago and brought in residual traffic.
http://www.dailyblogtips.com/43-web-design-mistakes-you-should-avoid/
Posted it on the 30th of April, got stumbled a lot and made it to delicious front page. 25,000 page views more or less on that day.
My biggest day came earlier this month and was due to participating in the top five writing project right here. It didn’t happen right away but my top 5 post began to get picked up slowly on various social bookmarking sites, most significantly stumbleupon. Then it was picked up by Hugh Hewitt and Instapundit within about 24 hours from each other.
The publicity on those sites made it possible to get all the way to the front page of Digg. Unfortunately that was fairly short-lived as the surge of thousands of hits within a couple minutes ended up bringing my hosting account to a grinding halt.
So I didn’t do anything special, just participated in the group writing project with decent content and it organically grew into something that became fairly popular.
Mine keeps growing everyday. I started a blogroll for foodies on leftoverqueen.com and now both of my websites get lost more traffic and it keeps increasing each day!
The day I wrote a post about Guy Kawasaki’s Truemors. I posted a link on Truemors itself and then got some hits from Digg.
My biggest traffic days have happened when my blog was linked by higher-profile blogs. Twice it happened with Wonkette; the best happened on a Thursday evening, so the link stayed on their front page for a few days. I don’t generally beg for links, so I don’t know how they found my posts. The two carnivals I hosted have also been major traffic days.
My best day, by far, was my post recapping the first round of the NFL draft. Every one of my visits for the next two days (second day was most) was from the same google search or something similar: “2007 nfl draft grades.” My traffic spiked about 1000%. I still get a few visitors with the same query.