Blog traffic: A review of a mini-blog-storm
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Blogstorms are relative. If you normally get a dozen visitors, the first time you get 200 in a day might be exciting. If you normally get 10,000 visitors in a day, 250,000 is where you might say, “cool!”. I got to experience my first bonafide blogstorm last week, and want to review. Before I do, let me give some background.
It has been about a month or so since the complete zero-ranking by Google. My direct advertisers continue to renew their ads. I lost one link through TLA, but it was a link that had been purchased very early while my rates were low, so I’m fine with it. I’ve also had a quality review purchased through ReviewMe.
Opportunities available to me at Izea/PPP dropped very low in the weeks that followed. However, there has been a marked increase in the last 10 days as advertisers appear to be buying-off on RealRank. While they no longer get link-juice (supposedly), they are getting word-of-mouth and see the value in branding via blogs.
The biggest difference for me, however, has been the way I market my blogs. I decided to test a variety of social media and types of posts. Where before I was trying to generate linkbait once or twice a week and trying to get links like everyone else, now I wanted to focus on traffic.
Hitting breaking news was ok for picking up search engine traffic. I picked up news about Artemis Pyle of Lynyrd Skynyrd, and saw a couple dozen extra visitors. I wrote some decent posts in this space about Realrank and whatnot, and Stumbled it, and saw a couple hundred visitors. Interesting.
Then, I picked up news about Jessica Sierra of American Idol getting arrested and offering the cop oral sex if he’d release her, and the place went wild. In recent months, a normal day was about 100 uniques on the blog this was posted to. I was picking up 2,000+ for several days, then maintained about ~1,500 per day as I tracked more news about Debra Lafave, the Tampa teacher that was arrested for violating probation from a conviction for having sex with a student. Ironically, I also picked up a great authority link that was nofollowed but brought several hundred uniques - Wikipedia.
November’s traffic was as follows:
Just twelve days into December, and we stand as follows:
Then, I stopped posting for several days. Even without fresh content, traffic continued to run about 3x higher than normal.
Lessons learned:
- Sex sells
- The more titillating the content, the better.
- Social media blows away search for “traffic”
However, I did not start experimenting with monetizing content until well into this upswing, but my gut tells me this is not “qualified” traffic, meaning they aren’t on the site looking for something that has value for which I could charge. This is an important distinction. But, the upswing does help with traffic-heavy metrics like Alexa, Compete, and Realrank, so this will lead to qualifying for better paid post opportunities in the future, so long as I can maintain the higher traffic base.
Popularity: 36% [?]
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The lesson learned? Start posting nude photos of yourself!