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.
Thank you Darren and all the readers of Problogger for my biggest day of traffic yet. It was the 14th of May and it happened because of a post I submitted to the Top 5 group writing project in May.
I’ve written a post about it with more details and stats here:
http://samirbharadwaj.com/blog/the-may-2007-report/
Thanks!
I got almost a hundred hits from posting a comment on this post, too :)
It looks like most of these submissions are due to Digg. Mine is also. :) My freeware review article on deleted file recovery in windows XP hit the front page of digg on Monday, December 12 ,2005. I got 15000 visitors in one day from the 1400 digg!
My biggest traffic day would’ve been March 16th; I posted an article entitled How to Find Great Free Photos for Your Blog.
This is one of my few posts I’ve ever promoted heavily to other bloggers. This one I pitched to sites about blogging, productivity sites, and yourself. A number of small sites picked it up, but the big boost came from http://www.lifehack.org/.
The massive influx of traffic from Lifehack also helped me hit the front page of del.icio.us and del.icio.us/popular. While I also got minor traffic from Digg, the article stalled on with only 26 diggs.
I tripled my RSS subscribers, saw my traffic go nuts, and the article is still my most popular piece.
Each spike of traffic I get for an individual blog post results in a small long term increase in overall traffic.
* When was your biggest day of traffic?
March 18, 2007
* Where did the traffic come from?
Google and other search engines
* What (if anything) did you do in order for it to happen?
I simply passed along a big news story (pet food recall) and provided accurate, useful information
My former blog [belgradeinsideout] got linked from the NY Times website – it’s a blog about Belgrade, and they were doing a story on the city, so they found my site interesting at the time. [Link] – it got me around 1000 hits a day for a couple of days while it was on the front page.
I commented on a post on DV Guru about why you shouldn’t go to film school talking about my experience at film school (and how I dropped out). My blog went from 3-4 visitors daily to having close to 100 all from DV Guru. I still get 15% of my visitors from that comment actually.
When I posted photos of the 2006 Mavericks Big Wave Surf Competition on my web site.
The bulk of the traffic came from organic search results.
There have been plenty of days very close in activity as of late but not quite at the same level.
I think the date was February 13th. 30,000 uniques in two hours. Courtesey? Darren Rowse – ProBlogger.net. The Digg & del.icio.us frontpages helped push that traffic even higher. Crazy stuff, eh?
So what did I do? I guest-blogged for Darren – ‘How To Drive Traffic To Your Blog’.
David Wilkinson
I had a huge day after this article on dating illustrated by legos:
http://www.kineda.com/5-steps-to-getting-the-girl-of-your-dreams/
My best day ever – today. At 2pm EDT my blog has recieved 1500+ hits on track for 2800 by days end. All courtesy of Mike Johnston (http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2007/06/aperture_vs_lig.html) linking to my post Aperture vs. Lightroom Best Comparisons:
http://www.notesfromatooluser.com/2007/02/aperture_vs_lig.html
The link came about in a funny way. Mike was setting up a new blog on typepad and I gave him some help. After my effort (mostly research Mac Blogging clients) I asked for a link as a favor in return. I expected a short post saying thanks to Mark Levison for helping me get started with typepad. Instead I got a ton of traffic.
My website was featured on HowardStern.com as Sarah Silverman’s page. I got thousands of hits that week. This week has also been a huge week for me as she has been all over the news for her joke on Paris Hilton at the MTV Movie Awards.
May 23, 2007… over 45,000 visitors in one day. Photos of a Star Wars-themed “Max Rebo” cake my Mom created hit BoingBoing, and were subsequently Dugg.
Somehow I ended up with page in technorati and was first on the search engine listings for the topic; that got me bit of visiters.
It appears that the trend is from ‘social sites.’
Someone likes some particular content – and lets everyone know about it.
:-)
As for me, my biggest traffic day was a while ago – and on a different blog (SupernaturalWarfare. It was because two of my friends entered into a comment discussion/debate. So they were on and off my blog virtually all day for two days. The second day was the biggest – them two were going back and forth and some of my other friends got wind of it and threw in some comments as well. So that day (I can’t remember when…) was my biggest hits and comments day. :-)
Fleshbot.com on the gawker network did a story on us..
got about 2000 uniques in 24 hours. not bad… still a good source of traffic.
My top three biggest days came from the following:
1) USA Today linked me in their blog. They ran a story about Lindsay Lohan’s new dogs and I had run a similar article with pics, they linked to me since I had the pictures. (14k hits in one day)
2) Shape Magazine also linked to me, I think, if I remember correctly it was about Katharine McPhee and her dog Nena, they talked about her and her dog and linked to a previous article I had written about the two. (7k hits in one day)
3) A much bigger blog linked to me before and I can’t remember which one but I had over 7000 hits that day too.
54 views on day 1
53 views on day 2
98 views on day 3 (iloveyourtshirt – they did a feature on me)
111 views on day 4 (still getting the traffic from the feature)
74 views on day 5
i am now in day 6 and have a few things and other features I’m working on
let’s see how we go and see if can double the peak and daily views
400 unique visitors in a day…
when a much bigger blog linked to me
40,000 pageviews (25,000 unique visitors) in a day to a roundup post gathering and linking to the 8 funniest things I could find that were both on and about StumbleUpon. Can you guess where the traffic came from? :)
When Digg hit of course. I got over 13k uniques sadly it crashed my server!
those are some cool responses, unfortunately i’m nowhere near those numbers. i am too embarrassed to say what my numbers are. maybe sometime soon i’ll have a good story to share.
Around Easter with my How to Make an Easter Bunny Cake post…
13000+ unique visits for that page alone and reached Top Ten on Google on several occasions with keywods around “Easter Cake” “Easter Bunny Cake” etc…
The irony being that my submissions of that post to Blogs centered social bookmarkings sites like BlogEngage, Blogsvine and PostOnFire, were barely noticed by my peers there ;-)