How to get 50,000 hits in five days
Would you believe that over the past five days I’ve had more than 50,000 unique visitors to this blog? The majority of that traffic has been direct to one post. Any idea what that post might be? A few weeks ago I wrote a post about a guy and the ordeal he went through in a hotel trying to communicate with a maid through a series of letters. That’s the post that has drawn all the attention.
I found the content for that post in my email or on another blog, I forget which. It turned out that the content was about 30 years old and appeared in a book. Anyway, the reason it has received so much attention and so many hits is because of the social-bookmarking site Stumbleupon.
Stumbleupon works by people submitting interesting websites, blog posts and news stories to a community that then votes on whether a story is worth other people’s time. I often submit my own articles to Stumbleupon and Digg because it can be a good way of attracting visitors, but the visitors tend to make only brief appearances and then never come back.
But still, if you can hit the front page of Digg or inspire some interest from the Stumbleupon community, you can get traffic, linkbacks and money through advertising.
In this case, I didn’t submit the article in question to Stumbleupon. Someone else did and people seemed to like it.
If you aren’t a member of Stumbleupon, go and join and then add me as a friend.
Lucky you matt! Maybe should you add other social network links in your post footers: it would increase the likelihood of such a buzz!
:)
Holy soap, batman. I am adding the social bookmarks right now! It's amazing what can increase traffic.