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 of traffic occured when I wrote a post on a new web site dealing with real estate. A young lady starts this web site and I’ve asked her for an interview. I have chosen a nice title (in french as my blog is french) that could be translated like this: ‘real estate 2.0 is born’.
Then I have place my post on some french digg like and I had so many votes that my post stayed four days on the home page of Fuzz.fr…
This was a great day for my blog and like a second life starting…
It was when I released the week 2 results of the Top 10 Emerging Influential Blogs in 2007 last May 26 at http://digitalfilipino.blogspot.com
Majority of the traffic came from Technorati. It gave a lot of link love to the entries and blogs they have cited.
Prior to the Saturday report, I was providing regular updates on the number of writing project entries and blogs cited through Twitter. I made sure to ping Technorati after every post.
on 16th May when I posted a video preview of a new phone. The most traffic I got from different forums where was posted the url of the article :)…I got twice traffic than before…=D
A day when an answer to a question of “Chi vuol essere milionario”, italian tv quiz, whas in my site.
The traffic come from Google.
Mine was around end of March when I posted my latest Clutter 101 article. I submitted it to lifehack.org (and Lifehacker too but they didn’t post it for some reason).
Anyways lifehack.org sent me a lot of hits, then a few days later, I got about the same amount from Stumbleupon, and finally the article broke the del.icio.us popular list. Unfortunately I’ve tried in vain ever since to replicate that sort of success :/
My biggest day was last week when I was “Stumbled” twice.
My biggest ever traffic day came when I was stumbled and included into Google News in the same day. Note, this is for my poker-king.com website, not the one listed above..
Digg x 2 + Reddit on one day = 1M page loads and 100K unique visitors. Happened last week in fact.
My biggest day of traffic was in April 2007 when I did a guest post at Zen habits (Why complicating your life makes simplifying it worthwhile). It drove 300 visitors to my blog, that was only a couple of weeks old at the time.
My second biggest day of traffic (just a couple of visitors short…) was 2 days ago when Wendy Piersall from eMoms at Home stumbled one of my articles ().
In terms of conversion, the traffic from Zen habits lead to the most RSS subscribers. Stumble upon mainly drives a lot of traffic as far as I can see.
Apologies, the link went bad. It was supposed to link to:
http://blog.lodewijkvdb.com/2007/06/top_100_ways_to.html
I write about mostly pop culture/movies/television topics. A week or so ago, I posted about the Lost finale right after it happened. I was, as far as I can tell, one of the first bloggers to use the phrase “flash-forward.” This gave me a huge amount of traffic and for many Lost related keywords, I was on the front page of Google and even a few time, above ABC.com itself.
Another big one was blogging about Laila Ali on Dancing with the Stars. Another google success.
My first big day (and I’ve had my blog for awhile, but mostly just played with it until a couple of months ago) was when I wrote a small blurb about the film 300. I put the word “naked” in the title. Hallelujah. I didn’t even think about traffic when I did it. I was being funny and just stuck it in the title.
I wrote a short post called My Vision is to Have No Vision, not thinking anything of it really. But it evoked a rather visceral response leading to 130 comments.
i got around 4,300 unique hits in one day because I got and posted exclusive wedding pics of Ashawaya Rai and Abishek Bachchan’s wedding. They are India’s most popular and powerful celebrities. With that surge of traffic it exposed my blog to get high traffic.
Hi:
It’s ironic you would ask this question because according to Google Analytics, I received a very large spike in traffic, mostly from Reston, VA. While I’m elated, I have absolutely no idea why.
Unfortunately Google Analytics doesn’t tell you WHO these people are other than giving you the network location, area, etc. I don’t know anyone in VA other than my brother (who I don’t think has been promoting my site) and a client (who doesn’t yet have a lot of traffic to her site).
So, I’m a bit puzzled!
Stephen Hopson
My biggest day, and it was totally unexpected, was the Saturday of Memorial day weekend. My barbecue blog got over 1300 hits. I was shocked and could not figure out what happened, as I checked keywords on search engines.
Then I realized my posts were picked up by a popular food website. Out of the blue. Obviously I’m posting more regularly and since that day my visitors went from about 3 – 5 a day to over 400 a day. I’m pretty sold on WordPress.
I don’t have a blog, but last year I translated a video in youTube after someone requested it in a comment.
The story is about a ghost. It is based on a video told to be found in a car accident, in Sintra, Portugal. The 2 guys and the girl were going to the mountain, at night, to hang out, and after getting lost, the pick up a strange hitchhiking girl, who says she had an accident. (http://coelho.homeip.net/articles/sintra_myth.htm)
It has usually little more that 100 hits per day. It is a static page. But in the eraly days it got over 10.000 in one day, because it was linked in a forum about ghosts. I couldn’t keep the audience because it is a static page.
I wish I had advertisement by then (although 100xfew cents = few cents)
When Gizmodo featured our Mr.Gadget 1GB USB Executive Watch. Thankfully our ISP catered for potential traffic.
We’ve also been featured on Channel Seven and Channel Nine at different times and they have been good too.
Here’s our blog link:
http://www.mrgadget.com.au/2005/09/mrgadget-1gb-usb-20-executive-watch.html
Gizmodo’s link:
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/gadgets/mr-gadget-usb-watch-+-not-ugly–123183.php
My biggest day so far was when I wrote a post for the ProBlogger Top Five Writing Group Project. That really boosted my traffic and it has stayed fairly high since then. I can only assume that many of the people who found me through that list decided my information was good enough to keep them coming back!
This was sort of dumb luck. I started a carnival for bloggers who write for baby boomers. One of our carnival members got featured on the Kim Komando radio program as the cool site of the day, and since he was hosting the Carnival that day, I was lucky enough to get some spillover.
My biggest day was when I freelanced an article with MSN that got posted prominently on MSN.com. My freelanced article included several links to my blog. It was a larger traffic rush than digg’s front page.
Lifehacker ran a tip I submitted about reducing errors in your writing by listening to your text.
Until now, the biggest day of traffic I have was 3 ou 4 years ago, when I hosted my weblog in the old Blogger (in Brazil it was later bought by Globo.com). At that time, we could fool Google easily managing metatags. So, if you put the name of the last Playboy Girl in the metatags in the exact month it appears, you get tones of visit. It was just an experience, that at that time worked. It’s not something I use to do now.
I’m getting to the point that I don’t care if I make money while I’m blogging. I LOVE to blog and I LOVE to write and the more I dwell on the dollar signs the less happy I am with it all. If I can make money while I’m blogging that’s a bonus but no more dwelling on the details.. it takes away too much from my 1st love which is to write and meet new people. (just had to vent and get that off my chest)
StumbleUpon on this story…
How to Spot a Midlife Crisis
http://lifetwo.com/production/node/20061219-midlife-crisis-signs-symptoms
Residual traffic has been strong.
My biggest traffic day was when a news portal linked to an article of mine. I got lots of visits from that website.
My biggest day was when I started a 4-week Social Bookmarking/Get 500+ New RSS feed subscribers this month Challenge.I received the most diggs (14-at present–hey, every litlle # counts) and started building my profiles (# of friends in my network) at the Top 6 Social Networking/Bookmarking sites. I nearly tripled my average unique visitors per day that particular day.
This challenge is presently running, so anyone who wants to join come on and let’s grow exponentially together!
Our biggest day occured after Foxnews linked us with their own headline “Purported Photos of Britney Spears Topless.” I couldn’t have written a more salacious (and untrue) headline if I tried. Conservative Fox readers couldn’t keep themselves from checking out a naked, young thing.
By the way, she was completely covered and nothing good was visable. God bless Foxnews…
My best day was May 3, 2007. I had 129 uniques that day. I frequently have totals above a hundred, but that’s my top. It was from a tutorial I wrote a few days previous. The visitors were coming from Tutorialized.com, where I submitted it.
http://redwallhp.ntugo.com/2007/04/18/tutorial-create-a-business-card-in-photoshop/
I had a story on the digg frontpage 3 weeks ago.. it crashed my server ..
the traffic was massive and i was able to convert it to some affiliate sales before the server went down
I remember the day fondly. It was May 17th, 2007. I posted this article about how much junk is orbiting out planet. I received nearly 900 visits for that one article on that one day!! I couldn’t believe it! We got 1400 hits total that day, and I just wrote that article because I thought it was kind of interesting, definitely not expecting everyone else to like it too.
Got on digg once, traffic went crazy. I had some posts on Crazy and cool inventions that seemed really popular.
Oh, and nearly all of it came from Reddit. Sorry for the double post, I just forgot to give the source.
My biggest day was 543 hits because I got mentioned on wordpress’s blog of the day or something like that. Unfortunately, I didn’t retain much of those hits. Ah well.
I blogged about how to use Google Alerts as Ego searches to know what people are saying (and to use as a promotional tool for getting out there to post blog comments)
http://digiscrapinfo.com/wordpress/2007/05/23/how-to-find-out-what-others-are-saying-about-your-blogproducts/
Our biggest day of traffic was on February the 9th. Though our blog is focused on everyday technology, that day a porn site linked to one of our articles. And man, that day we discovered where the real traffic comes from :-)
I swear we didn’t do nothing for that to happen. The article was about a virtual 3D porn movie, but with no explicit pictures or videos, I swear :-)
My biggest day of traffic was this past Friday. I am a pastor in Western Massachusetts and post thoughts on God and life a couple times a day. My blog is three months old and receives a modest amount of traffic – about 60-70 pageloads a day.
On Tuesday I happened to post a human interest story about a giant pig that was shot in Alabama. I posted a picture with the story and titled the picture, “Monster Pig.” Somehow my picture and link ended up at the top of the page on MSN image search for “monster pig,” and I got ten times the normal traffic Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
I don’t expect to get many return visitors from this, but it was fun to see the traffic spike.
Mine was when The Simple Dollar linked to one of the articles I wrote about getting fitter while saving money.
Gal
My biggest day was the day before St. Patrick’s Day. Lots and lots of people were searching for “How to pour a black and tan” (almost entirely from Google, but other search engines contributed) and found a video we made illustrating the technique. Traffic had been ramping up for a few days prior to that.
Didn’t do anything special to get the traffic, except create a video and use simple descriptive words. The video was several months old by that point. I pretty much expect the same thing next March.
My blog deals with travel and writing.
Mine was when I wrote about visiting the Neuschwanstein castle in Germany – I still get hits from that. Another one was when I posted about wanting to visit Kyrgyzstan (not too many bloggers writing about!). And of course, the top 5 five list Group Writing Project didn’t hurt either.
Mine was a day in which BoingBoing.net linked to my French AIDS PSA post. It led to a traffic increase of more than 12x my normal numbers. I didn’t do anything to encourage the link, someone just submitted my post to their site.
Back on April 5 my site was Slashdotted twice within four hours. Our blog tracks the data center sector, and both Microsoft and Google announced $500 million data center projects that week. That brought tons of traffic, and more than a little anxiety about the site remaining available. The next day I thanked our hosting provider for keeping us online.
When my blog was a week old (today it’s almost a month old), lifehacker featured my How I made a car console with duct tape and yogurt containers”, and I had many thousands of unique visitors within minutes. I still get traffic from that link, and it has been three weeks!
My best day was on May 3rd, 2007. I made a post, 101 Ways to Annoy Your Co-workers. It was a humor post that was just for fun and was simply link bait. Within four hours of posting I got onto the home page of Digg. My server grinded to halt, but I got on all the mirror sites and eventhough I got buried on the home page, I got tons and tons of residual traffic from the mirror sites once my site got back up. Then, the other social bookmarking sites were showing my post on their respective home pages. I did a recap of the experience here: Post-Mortem of My First Visit to the Digg Front Page. It was a learning experience to say the least.
My Blog specializes in nude art and nude art controversies. I ran a series on the teacher Sydney McGee being fired as a result of her students catching a glimpse of a nude statue at an art museum. in a similar case a teacher in new york was facing legal action for suggesting life drawing to his senior students. needless to say I was outraged –
I think my titles had a lot to do with my hits, linking, timing and reddit. my commentaries were some of the first out there. a few days of 2-4000 unique hits per day.
The High Cost of Nudity
Children exposed to nudes
A downside to the success of these posts (apart from feeling the need to live up to them!) is that they seem to have attracted some very unsavory search terms looking for nude children. I am furious but I don’t know what action I can take.
My greatest day of traffic came by accident.
I posted an image on my site of a face in the smoke as the second tower collapsing. I had watched a google video and saw the face develop and disappear.
Someone saw the post and put it on the Loose Change website and it has accounted for over 10% of my traffic since.
The site isn’t the Landscape Juice site but http://www.perigordvacance one where I write about our French life and renovating an old French Farm.
Phil
whoops! Forgot to add the URL to the image
http://www.perigordvacance.com/2006/11/did_god_watch_o.html
Phil
Biggest day was last Saturday. A fellow blogger’s post hit the front page of digg — the post was a listing of articles from the results of a group writing project — mine was the first on the list. I had over 3000 visitors in one day just because I was the first link on that list. Sometimes you just get lucky.
1 – More than 37.000 visits a day because in august.
2 – Digg
3 – a video of Ursula Martinez in Montreal
I submited a couple of posts to http://www.meneame.net, a latin american version of Digg.
This year :When b3ta featured one of my sheddies in their newsletter, got about 15k visitors
4 Years ago!!, when El reg did a feature on my site got 35k visitors over a weekend and lost my cheap server.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/11/14/click_here_if_you_love/
still getting daily hits from it!