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The Day 250,000 People Showed Up At My Blog: Case Study

Posted: 23 Jan 2009 11:02 AM PST

Wednesday was the biggest day of traffic that I’ve seen to any of my blogs for a very long time (perhaps ever). I mentioned this on twitter yesterday and had a few followers request that I write up how it happened - so here’s a quick recap/timeline on the 24 hours that saw around a quarter of a million visitors to Digital Photography School.

It all started with the publishing of this post - Long Exposure Photography: 15 Stunning Examples. The post is simply a collection of 15 amazing images all illustrating the same technique (long exposure photography). The images are all creative commons images from Flickr (meaning they are all available for republishing).
The post went live on DPS and was quickly submitted to Digg and StumbleUpon. I added a ‘Digg this’ button to the top of the post (now removed).
I had a feeling that the post would do well on StumbleUpon so was on the lookout for traffic from there so when I noticed the traffic coming in from StumbleUpon I tweeted about the post - noting that it was doing well on SU. This was the only ‘help’ I gave the post - a viral like thing began to happen.
Momentum from SU began to build as more and more people began to organically come from the StumbleUpon toolbar. As they did I noticed that Digg numbers began to rise also. People saw the Digg button and were clicking it naturally.
4 hours after it was submitted to Digg it hit the front page of Digg. It did so with around 110 Diggs. I was quite surprised by the relatively low number of Diggs that it took and the speed that it went to the front page.
The first hour after the post hit the front page of Digg the traffic was around 28,000 unique visitors. This surprised me a little as it was midnight on the West Coast of the US and the early hours of the morning on the East Coast (not usually the best time to hit the front page).
The diggs continued to come in. StumbleUpon traffic also continued to gain momentum. The post hit the ‘popular page’ on Delicious (where it remained for at least 15 hours… again an unusually long time - you can see the page for it here).
Traffic from Digg tapered off after the first hour on the front page. From memory it was around 8000 visitors the 2nd hour and tapered further to around 4000 the next few hours.
I went to bed around this time and expected things to continue to taper down and return to ‘normal’ sorts of levels while I slept.
I woke up the next morning to find that DPS had had another big spike of traffic just after I went to bed. Most of the traffic came from Digg. Getting a 2nd big spike of traffic from Digg wasn’t something I’d experienced before but it had definitely happened. It came around 7 hours after hitting the front page of Digg and send around 25,000 visitors in an hour (and quite a few more in the hours that followed). It turns out that the post had gained so many Diggs that it hit the ‘Top in All Topics’ list which sent it a second wave of traffic.
Over the next 6-7 hours Digg traffic again tapered off (but was still significant). StumbleUpon continued to send good traffic and I began to see a lot of secondary social media sites sending traffic (sites like popurls (it was the #1 story there for quite a while), Wykop, Jimmyr and plime) and also quite a few other blogs and websites (big and small) like The Agitator, Monitor and Naver. Interestingly many of the links were from non english sites. I have included a screen shot (right) of the top 15 sources of traffic to the post over the last 36 hours.
Today things are somewhat quieter in terms of traffic - but they are still around double a normal days traffic. Most of the traffic now is coming from StumbleUpon and secondary links from blogs and websites. From past experience this will continue for a while. StumbleUpon has the potential to send decent traffic to a post for weeks (and months). In the long run I expect StumbleUpon will probably send more traffic to the post than Digg (although Digg has currently sent triple what SU has).
What will generally happen next is that a little search traffic will come in because the post has been linked to from quite a few sources (Yahoo currently sees a couple of hundred incoming links - Google sees quite a few more).

So what impact does a rush of traffic have on a site?

Beyond getting a rush of adrenaline and perhaps a bit of an ego boost - what impact does a day like yesterday have on a blog?

Ad Revenue - traffic to the site yesterday was around 5-6 times normal levels. Conversion in terms of ad revenue was not that high - but did see a good bump. For example AdSense earnings were almost three times higher than normal.
New Loyal Readers - it is too early to tell how many of the 250k readers subscribed to my RSS feed yesterday (it is at least over 1000 new subscribers) but I can see that newsletter subscriber numbers were considerably up on normal levels. On an average day we get around 450 confirmed new newsletter subscribers to DPS - yesterday it was around 1000 (and there will be more as some take a while to verify). Today it’s over 800 (and will probably hit 1000 again). While a 1-2% conversion rate doesn’t sound like much it can actually be quite significant. 2000 new daily readers over a year or more really adds up to a lot of new page views on a site.
SEO - one of the best parts about a day like yesterday is the extra links that point at your blog once everything dies down. As mentioned above - there are around 200 links pointing at the post mentioned - some of which also point to the front page of DPS. There’s no real way to tell what impact this has on a blog but it is a significant number of links and will add to the authority of the page and site in the eyes of Google and other search engines.
Buzz - another benefit that is difficult to measure is that of ‘buzz’. There’s something very uplifting to an online community when they get noticed by other parts of the web. I’ll highlight what happened in the weekly newsletter that I send our regular members tonight and I find that doing so helps lift the morale around the community. It’ll also send a fresh wave of traffic to the post as people go to see what caused all the traffic.

All in all it was a good day. I’m most happy about the conversion to new readers than happened and about the SEO boost (I’m also happy that the servers didn’t skip a beat) - however I’m very aware that the extra traffic is relatively fleeting and today it is back to work.

Social Media Traffic Tsunamis are exciting events but the real challenge is to keep growing your loyal reader base by providing quality content day in day out. Speaking of which…. it’s time to get back to work.

Tags: Blog Promotion

Building Strong Foundation - It Starts Within

Blogging is easy, but that doesn’t make the foundational part optional. Many new bloggers overlook this part because they don’t want to waste time but in return they go in circles trying to figure out how to grow their blogs to get more traffic and revenue.

Your blog is the only thing that you have full control of. It just makes sense if you start there. Once you get a head start by getting the house in order, it feels better knowing that whatever you plan from there is likely to have more impact. Even a little boost in search engine position is worth it, if you take into account the traffic and revenue that you’re going to generate for years to come.

One thing you should be aware of though, it is easy to over-organize your house that you never move beyond those activities. That happens to all of us, even to go getters who persistently take action. It’s just natural because as human being, taking actions to grow a business often put us outside of the comfort zone.

Brand Your Design

When Kubrick was first introduced as the default WordPress theme, everyone thinks it is cool but nowadays whoever uses it — even if he modifies the header color or image — is at risk of turning off the visitors.

Boring themes make people want to click the back button of the browser. First impression counts so it is worth it that you hire a designer to create a brand new design from scratch.

If you are tight on the budget, pick a design that suits your blog best and customize it. A good theme designer is able to turn an existing design into entirely unique work.

No matter which way you choose, just remember that while design is important, it is not everything. Most successful blogs have been through a redesign or two. While optimizing your blog design is necessary, it is not that critical when you are getting started.

Just get a unique one up and move on to content production and promotion. A makeover can come later. Again, prioritize.

It is critical that you don’t skip this step though. Although there are ugly sites that work very well, it can be hard to establish credibility or show to others that you are serious about your business unless your design is professional. Moreover, bloggers will be more hesitant to link to amateurish blogs.

Optimize Your Blog Theme

When it comes to blog theme design, less sometimes means more. Know which elements you want on your site and add nothing else to your design.

If you are to sell advertising space or earn money by displaying ads, you may want to reserve space for those ads, but avoid burying your content for ads. Remember that visitors come for content, never ads.

Your goal with site design is to keep the readers on your site or blog as long as possible or take whatever action you want them to take quickly.

Steve Krug has written a superb book on web usability. It is considered a must read for whoever wants to create a web site or blog. The title is Don’t Make Me Think.

Another thing to optimize is search engine wise. While the visitors must be at the top priority, you should also optimize your blog so it benefits your rankings. Although more and more the criteria for rankings are external — things you have no or very little control about — never underestimate on-page factors too.

For long tail keywords, on-page optimization and site authority may get you to the top spot on the search engine listing almost overnight, if done right.

I’ve put up quite a lot of articles and pointed to resources about blog SEO on my site. Take a look if you find this a challenge or if you need to improve on your search engine optimization.

Tweak the Back-End (Dashboard)

WordPress is now the dominating blog software, so this post presumes that you want to use it for your site. Out of the box, WordPress is already very usable but there are a few things you should tweak to optimize your blog.

Some of the things you should pay attention to include:

Allow post notification. This may slow down posting but you should enable the option to attempt to notify any blogs you linked to from your article. It sends pings to the corresponding blogs so the bloggers are aware about you referring to their work. This is often a great way to start a conversation, especially if you publish insightful post on your blog.
Populate update services. WordPress has a list of blog pinging services you should have on your blog setting. By default it is only one entry, i.e. rpc.pingomatic.com, which pings other services on your behalf.
Optimize your permalink. Permalink is the URL that identifies your blog post, category, archive, etc. Search engines are now able to index dynamic pages with simple parameters but you should take advantage of clean URLs to make your URL friendlier. Remember that if you include keyword in your URL, it may appear as bold in search engine listing, which increases click through from search users to your site.
Publish full feed. This is enabled by default but you should make sure you have it selected. There was a debate about whether to use full or partial feed of which hands on I think the winner is full feed. If you are reader-centric, there’s no argument about it. Period. And in the long run, loyal subscribers will also benefit your traffic wise.

Keep Up to Date on Industry News

Whether you have been following the niche for some time or you are new to it, there is one thing bloggers should be good at. Getting up to date on the industry news is necessary if you want to be the go to person for your niche.

It is also very likely that you have a list of favorite blogs and news sites. Add them to your favorite RSS reader and make sure you make time to go through the list. If you haven’t made your decision about which news reader yet, you can’t go wrong with Google Reader.

Look for filters in your niche or learn how to create filters yourself. There might be blogs or web sites out there that track events and news around your industry. You will save a lot of time going through tens, if not hundreds, of RSS feeds yourself.

News sites usually allow you to filter your favorite news and grab a customized RSS feed. Learn how to do this effectively. Remember this is a one time process that may save you time repeatedly.

By using news reader, you are able to keep up with the news more efficiently compared to visiting every site. That saves you a few hours a day.

Learn How to Monitor Brands

Just like news, you also need to monitor certain brands. By brands, I mean any name that you are interested to keep track of. If your are an individual blogger, your name is your brand.

Basically what you do is to create RSS ego-search feeds. Rather than doing it regularly, you let news readers fetch the search result automatically to your news reader.

What is an ego search? Simply put, it is a search you perform to monitor for mentions of your product name, personal name, or company name.

The usage, however, is beyond egocentric though. Nowadays, it is absolutely impossible to visit each site just to see if it mentions the name you care to track. By performing ego-centric search via RSS feed, you will be able to know if someone happens to be interested in the topic you are writing, link to your blog, or mention your name somewhere in the post.

In other words, this is also important for conversations. Isn’t it one of the reasons you blog in the first place?

Plan Your Response Mechanism

Conversations may only happen if two or more parties are participating in it. With a blog, you may join conversations at any time, both as a conversation starter or to respond to other bloggers.

I’m also partially guilty for this in the past but responding to a conversation is important and may benefit bloggers. You can use it as a way to establish relationship with other bloggers but also to manage your brand and straighten the issue when — not if — one surfaces.

Nowadays, micro blogging tool such as Twitter is a quick way to credit people and quickly respond to conversations. A blog is necessary only for comprehensive response that doesn’t fit into 140 characters.

As you go, you will discover brand monitoring tools that will help you become more responsive to on-going conversations but I recommend starting with Technorati, Twitter Search and Google Alerts.

Become an Expert on Your Topic

No matter which niche you decide to blog about, it pays to become an expert on that topic. Being a thought leader certainly helps in building your audience, but if that’s too high a goal, at the very least you want to be resourceful.

That doesn’t come out easy. A bunch of articles don’t help at all unless they are really useful. Ability to reach out is also necessary. Spend some time to research on a topic that you like but rather than paying attention to the information, examine which content you really like as a consumer.

If you find that you could improve what you’ve found, you are ready to compete for the long haul.

People go online to find information. Even when they are ready to purchase something, they want to know if there is a better deal elsewhere.

Your role as a blogger should be to publish good information the visitors enjoy reading. That’s how you become the go to person, build your audience base, and finally monetize your traffic — if you aim for the long term instead of just expecting the visitors to click away and earn you advertising revenue.

It is astonishingly easy to become an expert nowadays. Go to Amazon.com and purchase 5-10 books about the topic you are blogging. Spend some time to read it. Surf web sites and blogs. Think about various issues related to the topic. Get involved to get hands-on experience. The more you immerse in the topic, the better expert you become. But reading is a great way to start.

Review

If you have been accustomed to traditional method of web publishing, some of these may be new to you. Blog software, for many of us, is an awesome way to get content up online but bloggers should know more!

Blogging is about joining conversations and if you read Cluetrain Manifesto, markets are really conversations.

Starting conversations is one thing but being proactive in responding to the market is necessary. You want to immerse in the market instead of broadcasting your message out aggressively.

Also in this post, you’ve learned why you should brand your design and optimize your blog properly. With that, you are ready for content diversification, which is exactly the topic for the next post.

Hendry Lee helps bloggers overcome strategic and technological challenges in starting and growing their blogs. He also writes about make money blogging on his blog Blog Tips for a Better Blog - Blog Building University. While you are there, download your free eBook and subscribe to his blogging e-course where he reveals his secret about blogging and content writing!

Follow Hendry on Twitter (@hendrylee).