Most people who have a blog write to be read by others and, in my opinion, there's nothing wrong with that. It is a way of sharing and a virtual means for making connections. However, with millions of blogs across the globe, people want to know how to increase their traffic, the number of people who will visit their blog.
As a public service, I'm here today to tell you about one method. If you follow my advice, you stand a great chance of seeing your traffic increase by 1000% or more!!
Now, if you are a regular reader of TRT, you're probably asking yourself right now, "Where does the Rambling Taoist get off with offering this kind of advice?" Just like most of you, I have a piddly little blog. Just like most of you, my daily visitor count is nothing to get all excited about. Consequently, you must understand that, while the info I'm going to share with you contains much truth, I'm sharing it in a very, very tongue-in-cheek manner.
I have discovered a secret to writing great blog posts and, interestingly enough, it could have come straight from Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, if they had lived during the computer age. What you need to do is to write a post that is immensely popular and timely BEFORE you know that it will be popular or timely. If you can accomplish this, the world will be your oyster!
All kidding aside, yesterday was an epic day on this blog. As of 7:00 pm, we had 204 visitors which, for TRT, is a very high number. We've probably only exceeded that number maybe 10 or 20 times in nearly 6 years. So, I think you can understand why I freaked out when I checked our blog stats one hour later. From 7:00 - 8:00 pm, we had 4,892 visitors!
From 8:00 - 8:10 pm, we added another 5,437 visitors and the aggregate total for 8:00 - 9:00 pm was a stupefying 13,751 visitors -- That's more in one hour than we had our entire first year!!
For the day, we ended with slightly more than 27,000 visitors. Compare this to the day before yesterday when we had a mere 197 folks stopping by. The number is so dang high I am almost completely dumbfounded.
I'm sure at this point you're dying to know why a blog that averages around 3,000 visitors per month can attract 27,000 in one day. It is because I wrote four posts on the death of Matt Hughes of Storm Chasers (Discovery Channel).
I didn't write these posts because I thought they would be popular or they would put TRT on the map. As with all things I write on this blog, I wrote about Matt Hughes because his death saddened me greatly and writing is one of the best methods I know for dealing with my own grief. That's all there was to it.
Did I think we might pick up a little traffic because of these posts? Sure. I thought a few stray folks might happen by, but because TRT is such a dinky blog, I thought it might increase our traffic by 10 or 20 people for a day or two.
I soon realized I had greatly underestimated the interest in this story. Over the past week, our blog traffic had increased significantly. Consequently, I figured that yesterday would be a banner day because the episode of Storm Chasers would mention Matt's passing. That said, I thought we might receive up to 500 visitors as the absolute max. Needless to say, my guesstimate was way, way, way off.
It should go without saying that this whole thing is a fluke. Within a few days, it will be a distant memory and our blog's traffic will return to normal. Who knows? We may pick up a meager few new readers, but 99.9% of the people who have dropped by recently weren't here to read about philosophical Taoism and I'm sure very few of them read any of the posts ON Taoism.
They were here to read about Matt Hughes. May he rest in peace.
As a public service, I'm here today to tell you about one method. If you follow my advice, you stand a great chance of seeing your traffic increase by 1000% or more!!
Now, if you are a regular reader of TRT, you're probably asking yourself right now, "Where does the Rambling Taoist get off with offering this kind of advice?" Just like most of you, I have a piddly little blog. Just like most of you, my daily visitor count is nothing to get all excited about. Consequently, you must understand that, while the info I'm going to share with you contains much truth, I'm sharing it in a very, very tongue-in-cheek manner.
I have discovered a secret to writing great blog posts and, interestingly enough, it could have come straight from Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, if they had lived during the computer age. What you need to do is to write a post that is immensely popular and timely BEFORE you know that it will be popular or timely. If you can accomplish this, the world will be your oyster!
All kidding aside, yesterday was an epic day on this blog. As of 7:00 pm, we had 204 visitors which, for TRT, is a very high number. We've probably only exceeded that number maybe 10 or 20 times in nearly 6 years. So, I think you can understand why I freaked out when I checked our blog stats one hour later. From 7:00 - 8:00 pm, we had 4,892 visitors!
From 8:00 - 8:10 pm, we added another 5,437 visitors and the aggregate total for 8:00 - 9:00 pm was a stupefying 13,751 visitors -- That's more in one hour than we had our entire first year!!
For the day, we ended with slightly more than 27,000 visitors. Compare this to the day before yesterday when we had a mere 197 folks stopping by. The number is so dang high I am almost completely dumbfounded.
I'm sure at this point you're dying to know why a blog that averages around 3,000 visitors per month can attract 27,000 in one day. It is because I wrote four posts on the death of Matt Hughes of Storm Chasers (Discovery Channel).
I didn't write these posts because I thought they would be popular or they would put TRT on the map. As with all things I write on this blog, I wrote about Matt Hughes because his death saddened me greatly and writing is one of the best methods I know for dealing with my own grief. That's all there was to it.
Did I think we might pick up a little traffic because of these posts? Sure. I thought a few stray folks might happen by, but because TRT is such a dinky blog, I thought it might increase our traffic by 10 or 20 people for a day or two.
I soon realized I had greatly underestimated the interest in this story. Over the past week, our blog traffic had increased significantly. Consequently, I figured that yesterday would be a banner day because the episode of Storm Chasers would mention Matt's passing. That said, I thought we might receive up to 500 visitors as the absolute max. Needless to say, my guesstimate was way, way, way off.
It should go without saying that this whole thing is a fluke. Within a few days, it will be a distant memory and our blog's traffic will return to normal. Who knows? We may pick up a meager few new readers, but 99.9% of the people who have dropped by recently weren't here to read about philosophical Taoism and I'm sure very few of them read any of the posts ON Taoism.
They were here to read about Matt Hughes. May he rest in peace.
Hi RT, I had the same experience when I wrote a blog entry on some technical computer stuff that was linked to from a major american computer news site. My traffic went through the roof for few days.
ReplyDeleteNico
Personally, I found your posts on suicide really insightful even though I had never heard of Storm Chasers or Matt Hughes, so I thank you now for them, but then I'm one of your regular readers, having found your blog a couple months ago. My question, though as a new blogger, do the stats pick up folks like me who use Google Reader to follow you with an RSS feed? Or do they only count folks who actually go to your home page? Just wondering and meanwhile, thanks for your blog!
ReplyDeleteNico,
ReplyDeleteIt's a real hoot, isn't it? The funny thing is that, for so-called "serious" blogs, 27K would be a normal day. For folks like us, it's like inadvertently hitting a home run to the moon...and back. :-D
Daphne,
Depends on which stat service you use. SiteMeter (what I use) only shows a visit if you click through Reader and come to the blog itself. However, since I also employ Feedburner, I can tell how many readers there are via the feed.
The stats I shared in this post solely are from SiteMeter.