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View Full Version : How I went from 5 to 1,000 views a Day



patrickprecisione
06-03-2013, 01:25 PM
Hi everyone! I recently had something interesting happen on my blog. This is my personal blog, not my work blog. I like to write about music, movies, comic books etc. and pretty much anything that interests me. The blog isn't very popular, but I enjoy writing. For the start of June I wrote a really quick blog post where I shared some interesting trivia about 5 albums that were released in June. Nothing special. It was a quick little post with some facts I grabbed from Wikipedia and a few other websites. I posted the blog, shared it once on StumbleUpon and left it at that.

I checked my stats this morning, and suddenly my blog went from getting less than 5 views a day to over 1,000 for the past 2 days each. Now granted this was a blog post about a general topic like music, but I think there's some things to be learned here for our business blogs:

1. Be Timely- I released a blog post about albums released in June on June 1. Try to write blog posts related to upcoming events and holidays.
2. People love Fun Facts: You see it all the time on websites like Cracked.com and Buzzfeed. People love posts where they learn something. If someone's interested in your product or services, there's a good chance they might be interested in some related trivia or fun facts.

Does anyone else have any other ideas we can learn from this experience?

nealrm
06-03-2013, 01:38 PM
Patrick,
I'm glad to hear about the traffic increase. But I think you need to look further about the cause. Both of the items you mentioned are good ideas and will result in increased traffic over time, but neither will result in the traffic increase that you mentioned. Somehow more people are finding out about your blog. Find out why so that you can repeat it.

Freelancier
06-03-2013, 02:32 PM
A 2-day change is nice, but likely not sustainable. You probably had someone do StumbleUpon or something like that to drive traffic for a short time, but only those people who come back regularly will keep your numbers high. And that comes from content that people want to read that's constantly being added.

dianecoleen
06-03-2013, 06:06 PM
That's a great news for your website then. You might have come up with a very catchy post that you have gained such traffic. I have tried the strategies you have given, though weren't able to reach the goal I wanted. Maybe it is because the topic is not timely and it is just an ordinary how-to post. Nevertheless, I still gain some traffic from stumbleupon. Maybe I should keep on innovating my post to achieve my desired goal.

Have you tried checking the referral traffic on Google Analytics? Were the numbers on GA the same with the view you have got from Stumbleupon?

patrickprecisione
06-04-2013, 08:04 AM
Patrick,
I'm glad to hear about the traffic increase. But I think you need to look further about the cause. Both of the items you mentioned are good ideas and will result in increased traffic over time, but neither will result in the traffic increase that you mentioned. Somehow more people are finding out about your blog. Find out why so that you can repeat it.

Exactly. I'll dig deeper in to analytics. Like Freelancier said, this type of traffic increase isn't sustainable, but the point I'm trying to make from my post was to figure out exactly what caused this improvement, however fleeting, so that it might be repeated. According to Wordpress it looks like alot of the traffic came from Facebook. Interesting...

nealrm
06-04-2013, 08:44 AM
Use the tools in the webmasters toolkit. See if you can trace the links back to a specific area of facebooks

patrickprecisione
06-05-2013, 10:53 AM
Use the tools in the webmasters toolkit. See if you can trace the links back to a specific area of facebooks Will do. I'll report back if I come across anything interesting.

Jim Briggs
06-05-2013, 11:01 PM
Try this one: write a gushing blog post about some narcissistic musician that googles himself every day. Worked for me (accidentally). Well he wasn't narcissistic, but he apparently was googling himself (or tracking in some way). Large number of twitter followers. He tweeted my blog, his followers retweeted, voila. Wish that would happen every day.

patrickprecisione
06-06-2013, 10:41 AM
Try this one: write a gushing blog post about some narcissistic musician that googles himself every day. Worked for me (accidentally). Well he wasn't narcissistic, but he apparently was googling himself (or tracking in some way). Large number of twitter followers. He tweeted my blog, his followers retweeted, voila. Wish that would happen every day.

Jim- Great story! Not sure if you can make it happen every day but still. I think I might try something like that, although instead I'll tweet my blog post directly to that person.

By the way, who was the musician?

Jim Briggs
06-06-2013, 01:07 PM
Patrick,

It wasn't a musician, but an author (I was just drawing an analogy). And he has 17K followers. This was on my personal blog which I don't promote in any way.

Its interesting to see what catches attention. I have another post on my personal blog where I write about creativity with the title from a quote (bed, bath, and bus) popular with people who share my brand of philosophical geekiness.

What's the Lesson there? Not sure. Name your post after quotes that people search on? I think in the case of my popular posts, the titles are catchy too.

96 global searches of "bed, bath, bus" per month
56 pageviews/month
That's a decent click thru rate (I'm the top item...of course not all those click are coming from the search). If so, that would be a 58% click through rate (which is a little better than the click thru rate on my signature here which is north of 0---sorry, contemplating my navel for a second)

Now if this were a formula and I could repeat it, that would be something.

(It would be interesting to hear other experiences)

patrickprecisione
06-07-2013, 08:25 AM
Now if this were a formula and I could repeat it, that would be something.


And if you discovered that formula, you'd be a millionaire.

It's helpful to try and learn from these positive experiences, although as you said, it's very difficult to predict exactly what will be popular. It's not quite capturing lightning in a bottle, but it's close.

Harold Mansfield
06-07-2013, 09:06 AM
I had a simular experience about 2 years ago on my old music blog. An incident happened at a club during Miami Music Week involving a celebrity that I absolutely hate, and I blogged about it the next day. Traffic to that article was 1200+ a day for a couple of weeks. Totally out of the blue.

After the boost, overall traffic to that site did increase, but I had already laid a good foundation on it.
I will admit that the experience taught me about creating posts that are staples. That solve popular problems, entertain, or can be used as a reference.
I had also scooped everyone.

These days I do have 2 or 3 blog posts that are always my daily traffic leaders, but there really is no formula to repeating that often.
For the most part, it's luck. Of course you have to write good articles, but there is no way to predict it.

When I get clients that talk about the need to create "Something viral"...which basically means they want a lot of free publicity, I shake my head. That word is way over used as if it is some kind of secret strategy. I've actually heard people use it as if it's a marketing strategy:

Q. "How are you going to get exposure?"
A. "We're going to create a bunch of viral videos...."

Good luck with that.

There are even businesses now that promise to create "viral" content.

patrickprecisione
06-11-2013, 03:02 PM
There are even businesses now that promise to create "viral" content.

That's a shame. Promising someone you'll create a content that "goes viral" is like promising someone you can catch lightning in a bottle. And I completely agree with you- You can't predict these kind of things but you can at least know what sort of content tends to be most popular.

Carsten
06-14-2013, 06:15 PM
My business niche is interesting for machine spotters worldwide. Last year I had the opportunity to attend a big restricted event of a machine manufacturer. The same night I published a long post with a large picture gallery of that event in my corporate blog. Over night my blog exploded from 10-15 up to 1000+ visitors. The lesson I have learned is that - in my case - pictures are the traffic boost and link bait. This year I have repeated this with picture galleries of manufacturers from a big trade fair. This time the peak was beyond 2000 visitors and more than 8000 page impression in one day. With a good SEO of the pictures this is also a long time traffic generator. Since the first picture post my blog is constantly beyond 100 visitors per day.

patrickprecisione
06-17-2013, 08:35 AM
The lesson I have learned is that - in my case - pictures are the traffic boost and link bait. This year I have repeated this with picture galleries of manufacturers from a big trade fair. This time the peak was beyond 2000 visitors and more than 8000 page impression in one day. With a good SEO of the pictures this is also a long time traffic generator. Since the first picture post my blog is constantly beyond 100 visitors per day.

Great advice! I think that pictures, similar to the list structure, make an article easily digestible. The fact is that very few people read the whole article, they just skim. And so you have to cater to that sort of mindset. It's a bit of a shame for those people who put alot of time and effort into their writing, but that's just how it is.

johngkm
07-01-2013, 05:35 AM
I think what you are telling is correct. You need to post some stuffs that are current I guess. Only then we aill be able to drive traffic to our site.

patrickprecisione
07-02-2013, 02:07 PM
I think what you are telling is correct. You need to post some stuffs that are current I guess. Only then we aill be able to drive traffic to our site.

Hey John. I should also mention this- That particular blog post was shared by an FB fan page of one of the bands I mentioned, which would explain the views. I still stand by what I said before, but that's what happened in this particular case.

Khalifa
07-17-2013, 03:29 PM
This is good news, if I were you I would definitely check my analytics account and see where this traffic came from, and just promote any future post the same way. For instance, if the hits were coming from a bookmarking website, chances are people on that site liked what you posted, so next time you create a new post, post it on that bookmarking site as well.

patrickprecisione
07-24-2013, 10:31 AM
This is good news, if I were you I would definitely check my analytics account and see where this traffic came from, and just promote any future post the same way. For instance, if the hits were coming from a bookmarking website, chances are people on that site liked what you posted, so next time you create a new post, post it on that bookmarking site as well.

Agreed. That's all you can do. Test everything. See what works. And do it again.

mrrodosmith
11-10-2013, 06:20 PM
Thanks for this information. I'm definitely going to take what you said and incorporate this into my own blog. I'm curious to know what your research revealed regarding the sustainability of that number of page views.

patrickprecisione
11-14-2013, 10:43 AM
Thanks for this information. I'm definitely going to take what you said and incorporate this into my own blog. I'm curious to know what your research revealed regarding the sustainability of that number of page views.

As I mentioned, the reason for the explosion in views is that one of the band members from the band I mentioned shared the post. I guess one lesson to be learned from this is- If you blog about someone's book, album, website etc. reach out to them and share the post.