Written on July 27th, 2010 at 01:07 am by Darren Rowse
What Was Your Biggest Traffic Day?
I’m preparing a presentation on ‘Finding Readers for your Blog’ which I’ll be giving at the Melbourne Blog Training Day next Tuesday.
It’s got me thinking back to some of the bigger days of traffic that I’ve had on my own blogs over the years and I thought I’d open up some discussion on the topic to see if we can identify any trends.
What was your biggest day of Traffic (or ‘days’ if you can think of more than one) and what happened to make them occur?
I asked this on Twitter yesterday and it was interesting to see the responses. Some of the reasons giving included:
- controversial posts
- creative posts
- random links from bigger sites
- social bookmarking events (getting popular on Digg or Delicious)
- ranking high for terms in Google around big news events
- breaking a scoop news story
I’m sure we’ll see some of these themes in your experiences but know that there will be other themes too.
For me there have been many bigger than normal days over the last 8 years. Two that spring to mind include:
- My Six Figure Blogging Moment – I had been blogging for a while and suddenly realised that I was on track for over $100,000 in a year earnings from my blogs. The first time I mentioned it was in an interview that I did. I didn’t really think about the implications of talking about it at the time but that interview went viral – as did my followup post. What kicked it all off was a mention on Slashdot (which at the time was equivalent to getting on the front page of Digg).
- Front page of Yahoo (sort of) – then there was the day that a post on my photography blog was featured by one of Yahoo’s tech blogs. That in itself didn’t sent much traffic but when that particular Yahoo blog’s post was featured on the front page of Yahoo for 4-5 hours one day I saw traffic hit my blog like I’ve never seen traffic before or since. I don’t remember the exact numbers but I saw more traffic from that 4-5 hours than I’d normally see in a week of traffic.
So now it’s over to you. What Was Your Biggest Traffic Day and Why did it Happen?
110 Responses to “What Was Your Biggest Traffic Day?” - Add Yours
Jaky Astik
July 27th, 2010 1:09 am
My biggest traffic happened when one of my document got featured on scribe. That was real fun!
Josh Garcia
July 27th, 2010 1:12 am
Hey Darren,
I look back and my biggest traffic day has to be when one of my blog post got featured on a huge article directory. I couldn’t believe all the traffic I was receiving for that day and several days after. Looking forward to what others have to say.
Chat with you later…
Josh
Dev - Technshare.com
July 27th, 2010 1:19 am
Hey Darren,
My Biggest Traffic day when my articles get high votes in social bookmarking sites or get featured on other blogs.
I think if you write killer content then there is more chance to get featured on other blogs/sites/directories.
Thanks :).
~Dev
Joshua Black-The Underdog Millionaire
July 27th, 2010 1:20 am
Unfortunately my BIGGEST traffic day was due to a silly picture that I used for a particular post. I was Tweeted across the internet like crazy and I got 1,000 new visitors. However, they only came for the picture and not the content, so it wasn’t worth much.
As far as qualified traffic goes, I have had great success with tying my small business blog content with a current event. I try not to use that technique too often, however, because it will lose its magic.
This week is my blog’s 1st birthday week, so I’m trying a totally different promotional approach instead. I will report back if it works.
-Joshua Black
The Underdog Millionaire.
Valerie
July 27th, 2010 1:24 am
Hi Darren! While I’m no super blogger, one of my biggest blog posts was also a list of other sites/blogs (like Dev, above). I listed all resources for intranet. Received about 100 hits in two days (a lot for my average dozen visits).
But that one was beat by a simple “5 ways to use Yammer.” Any headline with the “six steps” or “10 ways” etc. gets a lot of traffic!
Good luck in your search.
Valerie
Ultimate Blogger
July 27th, 2010 1:26 am
Well, darren. My biggest traffic ever was of 102 visit to one of my killer articles. I know its not to high, but still good for just a month old blog.
Thanks…..:)
Divya…….
Jean Sarauer
July 27th, 2010 1:26 am
My biggest traffic day was the day that Leo linked (in his ‘links’ section) to one of my guest posts on another blog. The guest post ended up being (and still is) the most popular post on the host blog, and my traffic went through the roof. It was my virgin guest post too–how will I ever top that? Well, I can think of one way, but I’ll have to come up with something pretty stellar to pull it off :)
Jen
July 27th, 2010 1:27 am
My busiest days were a list of green holiday gifts, a list of books that the BBC said everyone should have read (and commenting on which I had and had not read), and a review of a summer beer. I can figure out why the first two spiked but not the beer. I had been averaging a steady number of readers and suddenly last week – boom – a huge drop. I’m not sure what happened or if it’s Wordpress’ measurement too, but I’d love to know how to get them back!
Thanks!
-Jen
Kat Fulton
July 27th, 2010 1:30 am
May 4, 2010 when I released a very silly video of my shoes dancing with boomwhackers playing to the tune of I Gotta Feelin’.
I produced the video to show my readers how I use boomwhackers at a camp for kids whose parents have cancer.
Hee hee: http://tinyurl.com/274m8zl
Peter
July 27th, 2010 1:32 am
My biggest traffic day came on a day when I was linked by a high traffic tech site for a “how-to” type article on how to watch streaming video via your xbox or playstation – in order to save money. It continued for a day or two while my article was linked on the front page, then died down a ton – although i still get regular traffic to that post.
PFF
July 27th, 2010 1:32 am
My biggest traffic day was when I publish the first pics of the first Brazilian Air Force Mi-35M attack helicopter, at the plant yet ( http://vootatico.com.br/archives/2717 ).
A Sitting Duck
July 27th, 2010 1:41 am
So far my biggest single day was having the “Candy The Magic Dinosaur” series featured on Weebls Stuff with over 5,000 unique visitors in a day!…
That was exciting!…
;]
Mike Piper
July 27th, 2010 1:41 am
April 10-15 every year. I write about taxes. :)
Sudeep
July 27th, 2010 1:42 am
My biggest traffic day was when one of my article written on Swine flu and Ayurveda got its way on the top page of Google. I really had a good number of clicks to that page for at least for 3 months during those days.
Hope to write more on the same lines
Phillip Gibb
July 27th, 2010 1:44 am
A few days ago, it was Friday. I usually submit a few interesting filmmaking links that I have found during the week. This time I renamed the series and was much more intentional about my thoughts on the links.
The result: a > 22% increase over my last peak and > 300% over my average per day.
awesome – wich I could maintain that every day.
Actually I’ll trade the increase for 10 comments more per day :)
Nabeel | Create Your First Website
July 27th, 2010 1:45 am
Hey Darren,
Great insight into your spikes in traffic.
My traffic is directly proportionate to the amount of effort I put into it.
I have had no spikes in traffic yet.
Kindest,
Nabeel
Jeff Carroll
July 27th, 2010 1:46 am
My wife’s (Kelly Eddington) biggest traffic day occurred just last Sunday when Roger Ebert tweeted about her site. In one of his tweets, he had mentioned that when he watches movies, he noticed that no one has movie critic books on their bookshelves. My wife, who paints watercolor portraits, had just completed one of a little girl whose parents had one of Roger Ebert’s books on the shelf behind her. Kelly was a member of the Ebert Club, so she sent a message and a link to Roger about the painting. Turns out he’s a student of watercolorists, and he admired Kelly’s work. He replied on the club, citing her “technical mastery,” then, to our amazement, tweeted to his 185,000 followers about her site.
Later in the day, Kelly wrote up the story about what had happened on her personal blog, and Roger tweeted about that article as well, so we saw wonderful traffic spikes on both her sites. Good way to spend a Sunday:)
Markco
July 27th, 2010 2:01 am
On my warcraft gold blog http://www.justmytwocopper.org I wrote about the best location to do an activity in the game world and had a 17k traffic spike from the #1 wow site which aol hosts called wow.com.
Basically, if you want a traffic spike you have to get great content and connect with the people around you.
Mark Thompson
July 27th, 2010 2:19 am
My biggest traffic day was actually a few weeks ago when one of my blog posts when hot on StumbleUpon.
It was definitely a post about Controversy titled “8 Greyhat Tactics SEOs Are Using, Use at Your Own Discretion!”.
The post covered a lot of topics there were of great discussion, so I actually got a lot of negative comments because of the fact that I talked about many greyhat tactics that SEO were using. Either way, it made a lot of buzz.
bankelele
July 27th, 2010 2:41 am
For me its the two times a year that national school results are announced in Kenya – and thousands of parents flock to the internet to search for their kids or relatives results which are posted online, with many of them landing on an obscure brief blog post i did 4 years ago
Oliver Tausend
July 27th, 2010 2:45 am
Hey Darren,
my biggest traffic day so far has been my first “How to-”-video I shot with a screen capture software. People were amazed of the idea.
Thanks for asking the question.
Take care
Oliver
K. Praslowicz
July 27th, 2010 2:51 am
Mine came when I submitted an image to Awkward Family Photos (http://awkwardfamilyphotos.com/2010/05/26/toilet-built-for-two/) and got it posted with a link back to my website.
That link lead to a major spike on the day it was posted, and a very big increase in traffic for about a month afterwards.
ashok
July 27th, 2010 2:52 am
My biggest traffic day was when a guest post on a blog got noticed by a much, much bigger blog that disagreed with much of what the blog I was posting at had to offer. It did seem like the much bigger blog really liked my approach to things, though – they not only linked to my guest post, but they went right to my blog itself and linked that.
Sue Swift
July 27th, 2010 3:05 am
Mine was when the Wall St Journal did a feature on my blog (amongst others).
Pepe - pepeschile.com
July 27th, 2010 3:07 am
My Chile blog was featured in that country’s most popular newspaper. Despite people having to type in my URL manually (there was no web link from the newspaper’s site), traffic was three to four times my normal daily traffic.
The traffic spiked the day the article was published and then quickly died down the next day. However, the news generated so much traffic that I had to buy extra bandwidth from my hosting company that month.
Coach Chris
July 27th, 2010 3:14 am
Darren,
My biggest traffic day was during the World Cup. Had more hits that day then the entire time before. Just wish I could somehow do it agian or at least half that number.
Thanks for all the advice. Maybe a post about how to get over the PLATEAU?
Wilson Usman
July 27th, 2010 3:21 am
My biggest day of traffic was actually just a few days ago when I wrote about how 3 famous authors collectively made more money than some famous Movie stars and made it to the 100 celebrity list on Forbes magazine. http://www.wilsonusman.com/famous-authors
Kristin @ Peace, Love and Muesli
July 27th, 2010 3:31 am
My biggest traffic day was just last week. I wrote a list post, following your 31DBBB suggestions. It was 10 reasons why you shouldn’t drink pop. Pop/soda drinkers are a passionate group and I was terrified that I would offend them. I presented my points and then asked for honest opinions about why readers enjoyed pop.
I was blown away by the response.
Highest number of hits for me and most number of click throughs on Twitter and highest number of comments. Readers retweeted and emailed to friends.
I felt a lot of pressure the next day to keep up the momentum but decided to go with the post I had scheduled even if it wouldn’t be as popular.
The experience taught me that steady growth is how I want my blog to grow.
Shane Hudson
July 27th, 2010 3:36 am
My highest traffic day was actually one where I basically just linked to Copyblogger’s post about James Chartrand being a woman.
The linkback from Copyblogger brought in over 600 UVs. Now, to some of you, that might sound like nothing… but at the time I was averaging 80ish a day. Unfortunately , I did not harness (mainly as it was unexpected) the rise in hits.
Sachin
July 27th, 2010 3:45 am
mine was when I published the post 21 Test Management Tools Reviewed…..this post got maximum pageviews and in-turn maximum profit.
Stanford @ Pushing Social
July 27th, 2010 3:46 am
Great question and topic.
My biggest Traffic Day came with my “Lady Gaga’s 8-Point Guide to Larger than Life Blogging” post.
http://bit.ly/byh1xY
This was what I call a “Pop Culture Mashup” that takes an iconic topic or event and connects the dots with social media.
It generated almost 1,000 visits in about 12 hours. This was due to some fantastic generosity from Brian Clark, Amber Cadabra, Chris Guillebeau and others.
Sheila Atwood
July 27th, 2010 4:03 am
My biggest day came from being mentioned on a legacy blog as part of a blogging group event. This resulted in being mentioned on several other blogs. I still have followers that came from that event.
Jeff Gibbard
July 27th, 2010 4:10 am
My biggest traffic day was after a blog post called: “A Living Social Media Case Study – US Airways – Are they listening?” I’ve since moved it over to my new URL so the comments are missing unfortunately.
I had a bad experience on US Airways and I wanted to see if they’d answer the “social phone.” They did but only after my blog got like 300 hits or so and a number of comments. Apparently others have had bad US Airways experiences.
US Airways reached out to my wife, got in contact with me and gave us some coupons. I also made sure they reached out to the other commenters.
Gonzalo J. Suárez
July 27th, 2010 4:16 am
Hi Darren….
My biggest peak on traffic on one day was when a celebrity of which I talk in my blog, send a link to his followers on Tweeter. There was six times my regular traffic that day! (Of course, I think it helped that SHE offered me a giveaway of one e-book to my readers too… It’s still alive and is at this post). Advice: Get a celebrity endorsement, even if it’s circumstantial.
On my other blog, the biggest traffic day was when I talk about Paul The Octopuss, and an automatic twitter search box put it on the main page of a big Newspaper, even if it goes on rotation for only 10-15 minutes, it sets a record I can’t break yet! Advice: Remember to use #Hashtags when promoting your posts on Twitter!
I hope this was useful to your presentation.
Saludos,
Gonzalo.
quilly
July 27th, 2010 4:20 am
One of my most successful posts was breaking news — the obituary of a beloved blogger. It still gets hits. That kind of success isn’t easily recreated without causing rather unpleasant side-effects.
Rudy
July 27th, 2010 4:32 am
It was recently, when a TV show televised a photo of a horrific accident of a friend of mine. I had posted the information on this accident last year. For the next 3 days, my blogs hits to the articles that I posted were 150x my daily average.
It is a shame it was caused by this terrible event, but it was great to see the heartfelt concern of the public.
Muhammad Panji
July 27th, 2010 4:59 am
No biggest traffic yet. still around 30-50 per day in two blogs that I maintain. Not sure why but perhaps particularly because it’s not in english. Any tricks to get a big traffic for non-english blogs?
Tyler Tervooren
July 27th, 2010 5:47 am
Darren,
My biggest traffic day came last Friday when, just like you, I got a mention in an article that made the featured slot all day on the front page of MSN. More than 30,0000 hits in the course of a few hours.
That was pretty wild and a lot of fun, but keeping up with it all kind of wore me out. I’m actually happy that it’s a bit quieter for the moment.
Paul Anthony
July 27th, 2010 6:01 am
I think probably the biggest day’s / spikes for me have been double whammy’s, where a post gets onto HackerNews, and in turn the home page of Delicious. One particularly pleasant incident occurred when this happened, and then a secondary (linked) post also climbed the next day to the Delicious Homepage – then another wave of links as a result kept it going all week with tweets.
I’ve seen other chain effects like this where a tweet from an influencer drives delicious saves driving links driving good organic positions. Really, the secret seems to be getting good content in front of the right people.
S. Ali Myers - Soulful Body & Mind
July 27th, 2010 6:18 am
Great topic(o:
My biggest day and spike in traffic came when I posted my “Vegan Beginner’s Guide”. It ranks #1 on Google. It was stumbled, linked and shared on Facebook.
I think the reason it was and is so popular is because people are shifting to more conscious dietary choice. Not necessarily vegan but just a healthier lifestyle.
Tommy
July 27th, 2010 6:28 am
My biggest day was when Boing Boing linked to an article I published, and traffic went up about 1000% for the next week or so.
Glen
July 27th, 2010 6:49 am
One of my posts went Viral on reddit. I was actually really surprised on how much traffic it sent.
Apart from that I have maintained a steady traffic level.
Michael Senchuk
July 27th, 2010 7:15 am
I’m still really new to blogging, but I had my biggest traffic day yesterday (Sunday), double my usual traffic. But Saturday was basically nonexistent. I haven’t really traced a rationale yet, maybe just the nature of newer blog sites.
David Cross
July 27th, 2010 7:16 am
My biggest traffic day was when my photo was published on the front page of a very popular photography blog as a demonstration. I saw a 500% increase for several days of traffic!
Stephanie - Home with the Kids
July 27th, 2010 7:25 am
My biggest traffic day was courtesy of Yahoo and Bankrate, and without a live link to my site! All type-ins and Google traffic. Amazing to me how many people will Google a clear dot com domain name just because it isn’t a link, but that’s reality.
It hit 60,000 viewers by 10 am my time that day, then my poor, unprepared shared server shut me down to protect the other sites. Took all day to get the DNS to propagate to the dedicated server I got to take care of things temporarily. Next day traffic was well over 100,000.
The article was one I had been interviewed for a few months before, and had pretty much given up on hearing about it being published. Naturally it came just after I had moved, and just 3 days after I had gotten my internet connection in my new home. I almost missed it entirely!
Annie @ PhD in Parenting
July 27th, 2010 7:31 am
My big traffic days almost always come when someone in the mainstream media has written something ridiculous and I write a rational, but somewhat ranting, response to it.
If the post is about breastfeeding, there are a couple of facebook pages with a lot of fans that tend to share them, and then they get shared from there around facebook. In the past 6 months or so, I can almost always credit facebook shares for high traffic days.
Mathew Day
July 27th, 2010 8:15 am
I had written a post on a trending topic that included plenty of references. Most of my traffic came from social networking sites because so many people bookmarked my post for me.
Marco
July 27th, 2010 9:05 am
The biggest spike in traffic I had when I analyzed wheter a guy who won 1M USD in an online poker tournament was just lucky or if he really was a great player.
That post got linked by someone in a very popular poker forum. This more than tripled my traffic for two days.
Jimmy
July 27th, 2010 10:28 am
My biggest traffic day was yesterday at 45 visitors and I don’t know why, I’m thinking it’s from commenting on blogs like this, so thank you lol but 45 visitors is still pathetic I think…does anyone have a blog that is just starting out that would like to exchange links on each others blog roll…email me on my blog if interested, there’s also a link to my facebook on my blog as well.
mark taylor
July 27th, 2010 10:41 am
Writing good content that I’m proud of helps but what brings on the hits is the time and effort I put into getting it out ‘there’. If I’m lucky and have posted on my site, my facebook page, twitter and some on-line forums that relate to brewing beer I am pretty happy when I achieve 100 unique hits. Not a lot of notice but enough to keep me motivated.
P.S. I’ve earned $43.56 since I started blogging, obviously not into it for the money but it was still rewarding to receive a couple checks from my affilates.
Thanks for all helpful tips Darren.
mark
Beer Diary…
Darren (Green Change)
July 27th, 2010 10:48 am
My biggest traffic day was when I wrote a post about eating the snails from my garden as a form of pest control, titled “Backyard Escargot”:
http://green-change.com/2009/01/12/backyard-escargot/
It got picked up by foodies and greenies, and shot up in StumbleUpon.
Yeah, that’s what I want to be remembered for :-).
Julius
July 27th, 2010 11:54 am
I think it happened around May of this year, due to a controversial post. Another big traffic day happened when we ranked well in Google.
Stanford @ PushingSocial
July 27th, 2010 11:54 am
My largest traffic day came a few weeks ago when I posted “Lady Gaga’s 8-Point Guide to Larger than Life Blogging”. The post was mentioned via twitter by some of the larger blogs like Copyblogger and others.
In about 24 hours, I received around 1,000 visits to the Pushing Social blog. The post is still getting a fair amount of traffic – by far the most popular
Stanford @ PushingSocial
July 27th, 2010 12:01 pm
Oops! I’m sorry my earlier comment showed up. Please disregard and the last comment I left. How embarrasing!
jason
July 27th, 2010 12:41 pm
My biggest traffic day so far was when thebloggingrobot had quite a few hits due to a post that ended up on reddit about google.
poorblogger
July 27th, 2010 2:35 pm
My biggest traffic when there’s a controversial news related to my blog
Madhav Tripathi
July 27th, 2010 4:17 pm
It is today. My blog was penalized but now everything is going fine. Today is the biggest traffic day. If I consider for a single post it was 31st December of 2009 for my post free SMS sending sites in India.
Michelle@MixedMediaArt
July 27th, 2010 6:06 pm
My biggest day (to date) has been offering a free ebook. Followed closely by sending our broadcasts to my mailing list.
boost adsense earning
July 27th, 2010 6:23 pm
the biggest traffic to my blog is from other blogs, its mean that its the fruit that i got from blog walking, and also the second stage is the hottest scandal on my country become my second source of traffic, i write about it, and i haven’t do some seo stuff but the result is really great, http://dewirya-putra.co.cc has visitor from facebook also but its still low, i wondering if i can drive more traffic from social engine like facebook, does anyone have a clue
Betty Jung
July 27th, 2010 6:27 pm
My biggest blogging day resulted in 1100 visitors on October 31. I had written a post on Halloween events around town. To this day, it is the most visited post and the highest number in a day.
Dailybits
July 27th, 2010 7:06 pm
Once in a month I score a big day and this is mainly when I’m brainstorming what the normal google users are searching that day.
This weekend we had a big dancefestival in Belgium (tomorrowland), so I created a blogpost with some livesets from the dj’s from this weekend. All festival-visitors started their workweek by looking for livesets from the festival…. Big visitorspike was the result.
Noel
July 27th, 2010 7:24 pm
“ranking high for terms in Google around big news events”
This is the usual reason I have high traffic days. At my blog, I do reviews of UFC events, so I try to get them out as quickly as possible to make sure that people are still excited about reading stuff about them.
Tech Maish
July 27th, 2010 8:09 pm
I was getting 5000 per day when i was on blogger, but after migrating my blog to Wordpress. My blog traffic is now only 2000.
This is quite interesting, but it happened with me.
CAL
July 27th, 2010 10:04 pm
My biggest traffic day was 30k+ uniques.
I casually logged into my analytics account to have a look at stats and saw a huge jump in traffic.
My post was a collection of HD Nature Wallpapers and someone had stumbled it and things took off from there. Had a good return with AdSense too.
I thank you mysterious StumbleUponer……
Kristen@TheFrugalGirl
July 27th, 2010 10:25 pm
Mine was definitely the day there was a feature about me on TV, back in February.
Deb
July 27th, 2010 10:33 pm
I’ve had two, one was the first time I was in a Carnival and the second was when I started contributing to a new blog with a different audience. This second one has been sustained, with a spike on my first post, which was slightly controversial, and maintained high numbers since. In neither case was it a particular post, it was getting my name in front of a new audience.
Dean Saliba
July 27th, 2010 10:40 pm
It is normally when a more popular bloger either mentioned one of my posts on their blog or retweets it on Twitter. :)
Bishwajeet
July 27th, 2010 10:55 pm
I got the biggest traffic in one of joke site, due to joke being submitted by someone on Stumble Upon . It was crazy 48k uniques in a single day .
Tony Hastings
July 27th, 2010 11:01 pm
Hi Darren,
My blog is still small but is growing steadily, best day by far was when I placed the first comment on Zane Lowe’s BBC blog to coincide with the release of the first video from the last Pendulum album. I added a link to a Pendulum Top 10 that I had just done and I think just about every visitor to his blog hit me over the next couple of days!
I guess what I learnt from that was it’s all about spotting the trends and then getting the timing right, not always the easiest thing to do.
Thanks
Tony
Cindy Ratzlaff
July 27th, 2010 11:10 pm
My biggest traffic day on http://QueenofYourOwnLife.com was following an appearance on The Craig Ferguson Show. His fans are amazing and that connection spiked traffic 4,000%…I kid you not.
Amelia
July 27th, 2010 11:34 pm
when I’ve had an article, feature or an interview on another site with high traffic. I was invited to do an interview for the ‘Get Inspired Project’ which was both written and a podcast. I would definitely say when you are written about or mentioned elsewhere with high traffic on that particular site – it brings people over to look at you.
Amelia.x
Annabel Candy, Get In the Hot Spot
July 27th, 2010 11:36 pm
My biggest and best day ever was after a guest post on Zen Habits:) But list posts are really popular. I kept reading that and thought they were a bit naff so I wrote 101 Ways to Feel Happier (http://www.getinthehotspot.com/101-ways-to-feel-happy/) as a joke really. The joke was on me because it was super popular:) Still is! So there you go, the problogging tips were right – list posts are a popular read and easy to write too.
Jenny
July 27th, 2010 11:59 pm
My biggest traffic day was when I got featured on the front page of CNN. Beyond that, big traffic days are when good-for-you dessert recipes go viral.
Bryan
July 28th, 2010 12:05 am
My biggest traffic comes whenever i post product reviews or some controversial stuff on my blog, things spike even more when i send it to social sites.
RhondaL
July 28th, 2010 12:07 am
No doubt – my highest numbers come on the days leading up to the Kentucky Derby. I always make a point of posting “when and where to watch” the race. I also load up the post with SEO goodies. My traffic quadruples.
But, then again, I know that people who want to find out when and where to watch the Derby don’t necessarily want to read about my blog’s topic, horses and culture – let alone read about other equestrian activities besides horse racing. I do pick up a few RSS subscribers in the rush, though, so it’s worth it to me.
The Romantic Vineyard
July 28th, 2010 12:12 am
Darren, I love how you’re always encouraging us to examine our blog from a completely different vantage point. It’s so helpful – thank you!
Our biggest hit day happened because two other blogs that have been blogging for nearly a decade discovered us and shared our site with their readers. It seems they liked what they saw because our subscription list has grown, as have our daily hits. This month will be our biggest ever – nearly doubling our previous high volume month.
I love the blog community in that they encourage newbies like us instead of seeing us as competition.
Debi Walter
Caroline Mukisa
July 28th, 2010 12:23 am
My biggest traffic day was another list post but mixed with a strong emotional statement:
8 Things to Hate About Kumon
It was only 231 page views (my blog is 5 weeks old) but better than the 30 or so daily page views I was previously getting!
Ruben Berenguel
July 28th, 2010 12:35 am
My biggest traffic day was (in part) your “fault”. After reading your 31DBBB, I decided to convert one of my upcoming posts about reasons for re-inventing the wheel as a programmer into a list post, which turned into 8 reasons for re-inventing the wheel as a programmer (link here: http://www.mostlymaths.net/2010/03/8-reasons-for-re-inventing-wheel-as.html ). A friend of mine posted it to reddit, and from there it went into dzone and HackerNews, and it was a “little” hit there. Luckily, I had rewritten my template and was now in my own domain, too and all those readers (I got in 3 days almost as many as I had in my previous YEAR) got a glimpse of my new and revamped blog, and a few decided to even subscribe to it or to my twitter account.
Thanks for making me remember that good day :)
Ruben
Jaco
July 28th, 2010 1:36 am
I had the good fortune of being Freshly Pressed over Memorial Day weekend on Wordpress after only 29 days of blogging for a post I did on The Internet Experience and Blogging Behind The Great Firewall it helped generate 979 hits on 05/24/2010. Please note I do not have a monetized blog. I’m still a novice, and in no way am I a successful blogger.
Courtney Dirks
July 28th, 2010 1:36 am
Our biggest day was when we launched our service…we’d been blogging and building our community for several months then we surprised them with a solution (an online platform for artists and crafters to build their own blogs integrated with eCommerce/a personal store/and a way to sell their tutorials online). That was such an exciting day.
Devin of Travel Write Live
July 28th, 2010 3:08 am
Hi Darren,
My biggest day came from a story I had about the world’s loneliest animal on my In The Know Traveler site, which came from a featured story placement on Alexa — totally random. I have an odd keyword for a festival in the Ukraine that get tons of traffic every day. Odd how it works.
devin
Sandra
July 28th, 2010 3:55 am
One of my biggest traffic jumps on my blog came from using Google Insights. I noticed that a particular sweepstakes was getting a lot of attention on the web (It was something to do with Hannah Montana). I wrote a few posts with tips and information, and cross-linked them well. They ranked quickly in search for the terms that people were using to find the information. There was a big influx of traffic from putting Google Insights to good use.
GolfGurl
July 28th, 2010 4:48 am
My biggest day came on a weekend that featured the U.S. Open Challenge… My blog is all about women’s golf and the featured amateur at that event was woman golfer, Peggy Ferrence. Got a lot of hits, most of them because I actually misspelled her name!!! Taught me to include alternative spellings in my keywords. :-)
ami | 40daystochange
July 28th, 2010 5:26 am
My biggest day was the day my first guest post went up on a major site. Wow – my hits went way up as a result of that post, and I still get occasional hits from the same article. I tried to extend the love by having a related article that was more closely tied to my blog’s theme ready on my site at the same time. Need to do another guest post . . .
Julian
July 28th, 2010 10:22 am
for me
the biggest traffic spike is when the feedback happen after i do the blogwalking
if i don’t, then no positive spike :-)
Matthew Needham
July 28th, 2010 10:41 am
As it happens, yesterday was my biggest traffic day.
The previous highest day was two weeks before (also on a Monday).
Two major sources of traffic – Stumble Upon – viral post and timely content.
Jasmine Henry
July 28th, 2010 12:42 pm
As I usually don’t post every day, I find the biggest times of traffics when I post a couple of times a days or consistently over a few days. Other than that, I also find review posts bring in a lot of traffic as people are always searching for opinions.
JMoney
July 28th, 2010 1:45 pm
over 30,000 in a day mostly from StumbleUpon. and about 50,000 over 3 days total from that source. and i was on vacation the whole time, good thing my site didn’t go down.
personally i thought many many other posts i wrote were way more stumbleworthy so i’m not sure what drove this particular one.
nan
July 28th, 2010 2:22 pm
About 300 so few but I study on it how to me more traffic. Thank you for sharing.
Gonzalo J. Suárez
July 28th, 2010 2:23 pm
Addenda:
My best traffic day in history was today, when I published a previous comment in ProBlogger. It reached 50% more of my previous top!!
I hope that there are not only time visitors…
Saludos,
Gonzalo.
Elandre Potgieter
July 28th, 2010 5:31 pm
We had our largest number of hits in one day last week. Was nice to see that people are actually searches for the events that we list on our site. It was a popular event that got us the hits. Still early days for us though, so we are taking it slow. We only 9 months old now.
Tony
July 28th, 2010 6:15 pm
My biggest traffic days came from some tweets from popular Twitter users.
Motorcycle trader
July 28th, 2010 7:08 pm
My automotive site got 2500 in a day that was my biggest traffic day.
Camden Hughes | Learn Jazz Standards
July 28th, 2010 8:02 pm
The day that I added a plug-in on my site that sent note of my daily posts to google, ask, etc. I got a big jump in traffic on my jazz blog. It helped my posts to get indexed much more quickly. I highly recommend it!
lantern light
July 28th, 2010 8:48 pm
my biggest traffic day came from a social site even i dont know who submitted my url to the site, what a surprise!
Craig
July 29th, 2010 2:06 am
My biggest traffic day was when the US women’s sabre team swept the medals for the individual event. I was fortunate enough to be reporting live from Beijing and put up a series of posts during the day which culminated in this piece: http://www.fencing.net/813/zagunis-wins-gold-us-women-sweep/
Since I run a fencing forum, my traffic spike was from a combination of my community all hanging onto the site to discuss the event as well as the rapid fire blog updates.
Carrie
July 29th, 2010 2:53 am
my biggest traffic day was april 20, 2010 (coincidentally also my birthday but i doubt that had anything to do with it being my biggest traffic day). i got 90% of my traffic from stumbleupon that day to this post about the wii fit http://www.carrieactually.com/wii-fit-routine-addiction/
Nicole Williams
July 29th, 2010 4:29 pm
My blog has only be around for two weeks or so and my highest traffic day included 45 unique visitors. It was when I posted a racy, celeb/entertainment-related headline. From what I’ve seen thus far, it’s the headlines that bring new eyes and the content that keeps them coming back.
Nicole Williams
twentysomethingmoms.wordpress.com
Tinh
July 29th, 2010 4:52 pm
I have experienced with my biggest day traffic when I shared a tip on how to create facebook username, my hosting was overloaded that time too
Camden Hughes
July 29th, 2010 5:22 pm
I started getting more traffic to my jazz blog right after I added a plug-in to my wordpress that immediately sent my information to google, ask, etc. I didn’t have to wait to be indexed anymore!
Fernando
July 29th, 2010 9:32 pm
I’ve recently seen traffic spiking on my blog. I attribute it to 3 reasons. I used to mix 100% original posts with recycled news, I mean, I would piggyback on interesting news, recycle the information, give it a personal twist and publish it. Since I stopped doing that and switched to %100 original content I’ve gotten more traffic and a significant increase in comments.
The second reason is that I’ve been posting orginial content more regularly and the feedback I’ve been getting is that my writing has improved.
The third reason is social media. I’ve been promoting my posts on twitter and facebook since I started the blog last year. I’ve never gotten too much traffic from Digg (maybe because I’m not into the pop/tech niche, I mostly write about career development). Since I started using Stumbleupon a few days ago, monthly referrals have overtaken facebook in just 3 days.
My blog is not too big yet since I moved from a wp.com to wp.org and lost readers in the transition.
I’ve been getting between 10 visits and 20 PV per day.
Since I changed my strategy 2 weeks ago, I’m seeing 40 visits and around 200 PV a day. Bounce rate went down from 80% to 20% and the vist-to-PV ratio has gone from 1:2 to 1:4
I hope the trend continues
Rosco
July 30th, 2010 12:37 am
Hi Darren,
Another great post.
My biggest spikes always tend to come when an article I’ve written is posted to Reddit or gets a few Diggs and it tends to be restricted to that one article.
I suppose this traffic does give exposure to the rest of the site and hopefully encourages a few RSS subscribers or social bookmarks in the process.
Cheers
Rosco
KrazeeLiLFuFu
July 30th, 2010 7:10 pm
I hope to one day reach your level. The biggest problem I have right now is generating traffic to my site. Hopefully as time progresses and I learn more about SEO and other factors that help drive traffic, I’ll be able to reach your level! Great post once again!
Matthew Kimberley
July 30th, 2010 9:32 pm
39.988 unique visitors on Tuesday May 4th 2010.
I wrote a post called “Ten Things You Should Already Know By Now” which was picked up by StumbleUpon …
Tweeted 292 times, and 128 comments …
(My previous biggest day had been in February, with 906 uniques after I was featured in Lifehacker …)
Marcy S
July 31st, 2010 3:44 am
My biggest traffic day was the day Eunice Kennedy died. I blogged about her work and connection to people with disabilities, and why she was committed to it: Rosemary Kennedy, her sister, had spent her life in an institution after being lobotomized. Most people don’t know about that story, but I learned and read about it many years ago. The visits continued for a few days. The post also inspired many comments and much discussion. And I hadn’t even planned it, or known it would be so popular.
make money
July 31st, 2010 4:42 pm
My largest traffic day was actually a few weeks ago when one of my weblog posts when hot on StumbleUpon.
It was definitely a post about Controversy titled “8 Greyhat Tactics SEOs Are Using, Use at Your Own Discretion!”.
The post covered plenty of topics there were of great discussion, so I actually got plenty of negative comments because of the fact that I talked about plenty of greyhat tactics that SEO were using. Either way, it made plenty of buzz.
make money
July 31st, 2010 4:43 pm
you’ve made some fascinating if not amazing points here. I’m not a Lady Gaga fan but I can’t cease singing Popooker face, popooker face every one time in some time, and although I’m not interested together with her music I see her face on a regular basis and now I recognize her when I see her on TV. I agree that he’s some excellent marketing skills that all of us could learn from. Thanks for this post.
Free Stuff
August 1st, 2010 9:45 pm
Mine always seems to be the weekends!
Reza Winandar
August 9th, 2010 9:13 pm
My biggest traffic day is when my blogs are listed on the homepage of Digg :)
Sweepstakes and Contests
August 17th, 2010 4:08 pm
My biggest traffic day actually happen two years ago just before Xmas, It was an article I wrote about Nintendo Balance Board for one of my product review blog. I ranked #1 on Google for a special keyword. Traffic was huge that day and I was a happy affiliate ;)
windows 7 optimizer download
August 31st, 2010 11:16 pm
There are several fantastic thoughts the following. I must overhaul our web site someday. My goal is to begin from the start these times I do believe.
Comments will be closed off on this post 90 days after it is published. Apologies to those this impacts but it's a regrettable and temporary measure to combat a growing comment spam problem. See our most recent posts where you can comment here.
Leave a Reply