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.
1)Yesterday
2)Digg
3)Took an awesome photo.
50,000+ visits and 30+GB of bandwidth in 24 hours.
http://www.digg.com/design/Amazing_HDR_photo_of_monsoon_arriving_in_Mumbai_India
Hehe :)
* When was your biggest day of traffic?
Modern era: May 25th, 387pv.
Old era: Dec 28 ’06, 412pv.
* Where did the traffic come from?
Modern era: Google and Google Blogsearch
Old era: Technorati and Blogsearch
* What (if anything) did you do in order for it to happen?
Modern era: Misspelled Jordin Spark’s first name.
Old era: Wrote about Jennifer Aniston’s breasts.
The last two need explaining; I wrote about Jordin’s win on American Idol and accidentally spelled her first name wrong (Jordan) in the post title. Because no site with significant page rank spelled her name wrong, I didn’t have to fight for results in Google. My page rank of 4/10 was enough to get my post the 5th result on Google for her name…spelled wrong. This post has brought me the most traffic of any other for months.
The old era thing was a legal analysis of a copyright infringement suit against PerezHilton.com for displaying a still photo from a film Aniston was in that showed her bare breasts, a scene that was cut from the film. Lots of people searched for stuff about her breasts and technorati and blogsearch brought me 700-800 pv’s over the span of a few days from that one.
Not much, to say the least.
There was a point this week where I thought my /average/ for the week was going to equal just under that record, but the weekend falloff will take care of that.
My biggest day of traffic for my older blog was on November 24th, when I reached Digg homepage (23,127 hits). Later on, I’ve been there twice, but I didn’t get the same traffic (I wonder why?)
And on my other blogging blog, It was during your last group writing project. (1492 hits).
My biggest day(s) of traffic have come when I got linked to on Deadspin. The most recent big traffic day was this past May, the 14th. I submitted a post, and it got put up.
On May 16 I posted my first audio file (a “podbit”) and used Twitter to point followers to the post. Brought me a spike in traffic. I blogged the answers to Darren’s questions here: http://tinyurl.com/2r6pmg
I got nearly 10,000 hits one day after I had incoming links (on the same day) from BestWeekEver.tv , Stereogum.com and Idolator.com
I’ve attempted to retain the audience, but haven’t done the best job of it as of late (as my stats indicate)
It was the week following the Sept 11 2006 anniversary. I had found a new video of the two towers falling. The same week, a psychopath killer went inside a college in Montreal and shot people. A local / province wide journalist linked to my blog for these events.
http://www.martinbreton.com/2007/01/03/look-back-2006-regard-rapide-2006/lang-pref/en/
The day with the most traffic, I got 10x more unique visitors.
brem
For http://bla.st/ I received a heap of quality visitors after a ReviewMe paid review by http://johnchow.com/
I got nearly 9,000 hits last year, but i couldn’t reach that traffic again, and two days ago i moved my new domain, hits are rising up now even if it’s not a high lone like 9,000.
I revealed the reunion and tour of The Police + some extra details. It got mentioned and linked everywhere from Rolling Stone to the BBC, billboard mag ripped the story without sours so that was less funny… But I got lots of traffic and incoming links. It was quite funny as I got the management of the band on the phone to ask where we got that info from. :)
A couple front page diggs and reddits got a bunch of traffic. Also had a post on the front of digg and reddit at the same time. Also, getting links from Agonist and DailyKos caused a nice spike.
Oct 2, 2006 when I live blogged a basketball game
http://www.hoopaddict.com/2007/06/03/biggest-day-of-traffic/
http://www.everybodygoto.com/2007/04/09/7-things-you-dont-see-in-web-20-from-web-10/
Got front page digg, almost 50,000 visitors to it since April 10th. Though the page view plugin doesn’t show them as I installed it later on.
I have 2. Not counting the Top 5. The first post was What’s wrong with Today’s Kids? http://acowboyswife.blogspot.com/2007/05/whats-wrong-with-todays-kids.html That seem to get quite a bit of attention. And my 2nd was http://acowboyswife.blogspot.com/2007/05/where-is-womans-place.html . Boy did that one strike a nerve with the women. I got traffic from everywhere on that one.
We posted about a Sony Ericson Walkman phone (the first one). Yahoo! Japan linked to our page, at approximately lunch time in Japan. Sony + Walkman + Japan + lunch time seems to be hot stuff – more than 100,000 page views in a matter of couple of hours.
About an month ago, I got around 450 hits in a single day. I know that a number like that is small potatoes to some of you, but to me it was a huge number of hits (I average around 40/day).
The reason it happened is because I wrote a small commentary on the Fox show “Drive” and it’s (then) recent cancellation. About 1 week after my post, the news became widely known and a lot of people began searching on it, and as such I got a lot of traffic as a result.
The only reason I wrote on the show’s cancellation is because I liked the show and was sad to see it go.
I wrote an article with an How-to about ASP.NET Ajax, and ScottGu, PM of developer division at MS) linked it from one of his post.
I also posted about it on my italian site:
http://blogs.ugidotnet.org/piyo/archive/2007/05/30/79655.aspx
I run a Detroit Red Wings’ blog and was fortunate enough to attend Steve Yzerman’s retirement ceremony this past January. I wrote a lengthy post about the ceremony and uploaded photos I had taken. I received more hits that day than I usually did in two weeks. I was linked by NHL.com and some of the most popular hockey bloggers. Since that day, my blog has seen a steady increase in readers.
My biggest day was the first day I put tags from both Blogger and the added html tags from Technorati on my posts. It was about Formula 1 since that day my hits have jumped from about 500 to between 800-1300 a day. And because of adding tags to every post now my blog should get over 30k hits this month I hope.
DaveK
Slotcarnews.blogspot.com
I run a visual blog, and this picture spread through myspace like wildfire and i got about 2000 hits in one day from it
http://www.chance1234.com/2007/02/stoicism-that-which-is-not-good-for-bee.html
The biggest traffic hit was on my current primary site, LighterFootstep.com, which is about sustainable living and the environment.
Lifehacker picked up one of our “pillar” articles and ran it the Friday before Earth Day:
http://lighterfootstep.com/ten-first-steps-toward-lighter-living.html
The traffic from Lifehacker is great: smart, involved people who explore your site, leave comments, and subscribe the feeds. We got maybe 10k uniques over the weekend, and are still enjoying the long tail.
That Sunday — Earth Day — Kevin Rose dugg us (thanks, Kevin!). It hit the front page immediately, and we were visited by over 20k Diggers in the first 24 hours. I’m sure Kevin noticed us on Lifehacker.
The Lifehacker article wasn’t an accident: I occasionally forward relevant articles to sites I respect. So it speaks to the human side of our industry. Getting to know other bloggers is one of the most satisfying aspects of running your own site, and those relationships sometimes yield traffic. We do the same when people forward great articles to us at Lighter Footstep. Done properly, it works for everyone.
When I posted an article on my blog about the corruption and the bloopers in some television games on Belgian television. I added some convincing videoclips to prove the abuse and the lack of professionalism. It was my luck that a few weeks later, one of the best selling magazines in Belgium wrote a long article about the same topic.
My biggest day was recently. I posted an article on adsense video ads, and got tons of referral traffic from the google blog. I don’t want to seem spammy, so click my name if you want to read it.
I run a celebrity pictures focused site since October 2006. I’ve had two big traffic boosts since then.
1.) February 2007: I posted a picture of a Disney ad featuring Scarlett Johansson who was dressed like Disney’s Cinderella. A few days later I had 20x-30x the traffic I normally had which came from a personal LiveJournal blog post about “Disney wedding gowns”. Until then I had no clue those types of “housewife” blogs have such big readerships.
Here’s the URL if you’re interested:
http://celebrians.com/scarlett-johansson-a-cinderella-story-potw-1.html
I still get a decent amount of traffic to that blog post.
2.) May 29, 2007: This was my second traffic spike. Basically, all I did was to create a few Pirates of the Caribbean 3 wallpapers two months before the official movie release when there weren’t any wallpapers yet. I made the post SEO friendly and made sure Google crawled the post. That was a good move, I have lots of traffic coming now that the movie is out (especially the first weekend after the release).
Here’s the URL (just in case you’re a PotC fan ;-))
http://celebrians.com/pirates-of-the-caribbean-3-at-worlds-end-wallpaper.html
It never fails when I create a trackback to Seth Godin’s blog, my traffic shoots through the roof. I don’t trackback to every post as tempting as that is. M
The traffic stats of my blog for the month march is still eyecandy for me.One article of mine scored a link in by LifeHacker and that brought considerable amount of traffic which subsequently followed the traffic from frontpage of del.icio.us.A reasonably good traffic came from dzone.This was in march first week.And about a week later i was able to make a successful Diggbait and should i tell you what followed.
My biggest traffic day so far has been because of a combination. The first was the Top 5 Group Writing Project hosted by ProBlogger.net. Unfortunately this coincided with the death of a four year old child in my son’s preschool class. I wrote up a dedication to her on my blog, which got a tremendous response as well.
My biggest days have been when my sites are featured in educational newsletter with a big subscriber bases and then in the coming weeks as teachers hand my URL around their staff.
More recently hits to my blog posts http://teacher-toolbox.blogspot.com have more than tripled since hitting third spot in The Blogger’s Choice Awards
http://www.bloggerschoiceawards.com/categories/17
cheers
Adrian B
PS So I guess my point is… get noticed and written about for quality content and put yourself out there for some awards :)
May 21, 2007 Google
My biggest traffic day was yesterday. The readers made their way to my blog through StumbleUpon. The post was also on Blogg-Buzz. Since the topic of the post was on leaving comments at the blogs you visit I also got a record number of comments.
Before yesterday, my biggest traffic day was May 18th. However, the traffic was not as a result of the post that day. Rather it was from my participation in three group writing projects that all wrapped up at about the same time: Simply Successful Secrets, your group writing project, and a project on productivity.
Biggest traffic day was on a wednesday, netscape and stumbleupon helped a lot, was a post I wrote titled “writing an outstanding blog post in 5 (ok make that 6) easy steps“! :) It also made my rss subscribers numbers go up a little!
My biggest day of traffic usually at weekend, simple because I participant in the Saturday Photo Hunters activities, here and here.
I notece that most of the readers are from US. Comments left by my readers are encouranging, and really fun too.
Planning to do it every saturday, to maintain the traffic.
I am studying a Professional Writing & Editing course. My biggest day came after I told my lecturer about my blog and she put the details up on the whiteboard. A few of my classmates must have been interested enough to visit.
Keep up the good work Darren.
I did a recent article on my political blog. Didn’t expect it to be any different than the others, but it got Dugg and off it went.
Funny how the articles you think will be great are “ho hum” and then you get surprised by one you think is “ho hum” and everyone loves it.
Don
Funny you should ask… Today is our biggest traffic day, and it’s all due to tasty Lifehacker love.
biggest traffic day came from hosting an about.com carnival and also getting featured on the front page of the carnival site.
My biggest day of traffic was March 9, 2007. It was the day that my blog was featured in a L.A. Times article about paid blogging (specifically PayPerPost). When the press contacted Ted Murphy at PayPerPost, he suggested they speak to me because I was, and remain, their top earner. I spent a few hours talking with the reporter via phone, and clarifying information via email, and they sent a photographer to my house as well.
All in all, I was pretty happy – not only did I get a LOT of traffic (and a few hate comments) I had a few people contact me about advertising on my site, a few more who wanted to hire me to help them with their own sites, and a few more who just said ‘good job’!
First big day was Feb 18 2006 when Leo Laporte talked about my site on his radio show after I called in.. approx 10k visitors.
THE big day was August 27, 2006 when we hit the front page of Digg.com.. 70k visitors over a day or two.
both big days prove that (original and interesting) content is king.
I is my Thursday and its US’s Wednesday. It is a middle day in a week, and it always gain the peak traffics on that day. And the lowest traffics day is always at Sunday. Probably because my page provides solution for unix based command line, and majority of the source is from google search.
My biggest day of traffic was in mid-March 07 (which was also my best month for traffic so far) :-)
With some inside information I had written an article with the game schedules on Australian TV & radio for the cricket world cup many weeks before they were released by Foxtel, Ch9 and ABC radio
By itself this gained a lot of organic search traffic, but after I linked to a some streaming video sites where people could watch the matches for free traffic rose again
On 15th March I was interviewed by the Sydney Morning Herald and the resulting newspaper article Locals take to online cricket streams sent 4 times the usual traffic to my site for several days :-)
My biggest days of traffic have been when I blogged about some struggles regarding motherhood. I would imagine that is because I frequent too many parent blogs. ;)
I guess if I want to blog about other things besides motherhood and have better traffic, I better find some other blogs to visit too. :)
Still small time, but happy with the process. My highest hit day was the day I participated in ProBlogger’s Top-5 group writing contest. Thanks!
On my old blog it happened when I wrote about Rapidshare tools like Grabber and all. I submitted it to Digg. Traffic was average during first few weeks but then it suddenly skyrockted to 500 unique visit each day from Digg and Google to that single page which was good for a small time blog that had less than 50 unique hits per day.
The day when my posts got stumbled by quite a number of people – that gave me a traffic spike.
On 16 May, someone added one of my tutorial http://ebin.wordpress.com/2007/03/21/how-to-turn-your-photo-into-movie-like-effect-using-photoshop/ in stubleupon and brought a little traffic spike to my blog. Ever since then, few popular design blogs such as smashingmagazine and roscripts also featured that tutorial in their best of the month section. After a few days, Lifehacker featured that tutorial and at the same time on May 20 & 21, my blog was spiked with over 60,000 visits a day when delicious and digg listed it in the home page.
my biggest day of traffic happened after my theme was appeared in wordpress theme directory and weblogtoolcollection. I got tousands of traffic and visitors comes from these two sites nearly 5 days. As for my blog, I just installed wp-cache and active it.
My biggest days have been when I’ve gotten lots of traffic from Reddit / Digg. Quick question: how does one become a top link on Delicious? I still don’t understand the system really — does it actually provide a lot of traffic if one gets on the front page?
The days I get the most traffic are after I do an “advertising blitz” for my blog. There are good days to do this that will get me a fairly large influx of hits spread over several days.
But my blog is still small with a small readership. Problogger probably gets more hits in an hour than i do in a day (or even a week!). :-)
When I posted on giving out Joost invites. I got given 999 invites early in the beta mode way before it became the norm. I posted it and self dugg and self reddited. I got bombarded with hundreds of requests – which for my blog was pretty cool.