Last week I published this post which generated the highest traffic day in the history of this humble blog. You can see the graph above.
As you can see, over the course of the two days the post received more than 5,000 visits and nearly 7,000 pageviews. Where did all that traffic come from?
276+ retweets from my Su.pr-generated short-url which created about 2,760+ clickthrus and 474+ retweets as calculated by Tweetmeme.com:
Wow. Pretty neat huh?
There couldn’t be any more conclusive evidence that Twitter is one heckuva traffic-generating machine when used properly.
Of course, you can’t forget that the content has to be at least somewhat good too (or at least entertaining).
Some other “tricks” that are worth mentioning that “helped” this happen:
- I shamelessly asked some of my high-powered twitter-followers to RT me. It apparently worked.
- I published it around the 11:00am which historically has been one of the primetimes for my blog in terms of traffic.
- I published it on a Thursday, also a high-traffic day for this blog historically.
- It was the 3rd of 3 posts that day. Typically I post up to 5 times a day, but on this day I just published 3 and let the last one be that big post so that it would stay at the top of my blog for a bit longer.
- I waited to publish posts on Friday until after 9:00am since my Feedburner kicks out the email version of my RSS feed around that time. I wanted to make sure that this post was at the top of their email when they received the subscription.
- I used the strategy of lists. Posts that have lists and numbers in their title really work.
- The post was about Twitter. Period. People retweet more posts about Twitter on Twitter. Makes sense, right?
- I got lucky.
The last bullet point is the most important to remember. The retweet is powerful, but for most people it can just be sheer luck.
Finally, I’m not the first to blog about the obviously-powerful vehicle of Twitter, but it’s the first time where I’ve really seen it impact this blogs traffic specifically, and these numbers are nothing in comparison to the big boys. If Mashable doesn’t have 400+ for each post then it’s a bad day.
Hey your welcome big guy…..I know that when you are talking about your 'big' tweet'n followers you're talking about me and my tribe of 86, each one of us visited that site 50 times from 30 different computers…..because we wanted the record.
jk…
I loved this blog post man, it was hilarious, insightful and actually really helpful!
Nice work!
John when you were planning this post did you have this in mind (your list of strategies) or did it just happen to work that way?
i had these things in mind before i launched the post.
Great post. I love studying how twitter impacts my blog traffic.
yeah, i bet you get a lot of RTs…!