How One Post Quintupled My Blog Visitors

I don’t obsess over metrics. But I enjoy comparing numbers now and then in relation to certain events.

Responding to Loic Le Meur and his traffic sources for last month, I’d like to share with you this blog’s sources for the period of November 27, 2008 to January 4, 2009:

1. google.com (organic) – 10,486 visits
2. direct (browser bookmarks, etc) – 3,092 visits
3. twitter.com – 1,822 visits
4. yahoo.com (organic) – 1,740 visits
5. stumbleupon.com (referral) – 1,263 visits
6. facebook.com (referral) -1, 146 visits
7. msn search – 387 visits
8. live search – 349 visits
9. answers.yahoo.com – 323 visits
10. google.com (referral) – 314 visits

Seen in a vacuum, these numbers may not mean anything. But they do, especially when you consider I rarely receive significant visits from Facebook, let alone answers.yahoo.com.

If you scroll back to my five-week-old article of tips on how I use Google Analytics to track aggregate data of website visitors, referral sources, browsers and operating systems used, etc., you will note I included data from a three-month period:

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• 11,430 visitors
• 20,391 page views
• 1.44 average time per page view
• 1:09 average time on site
• 75.4% bounce rate
• 80.4% new visits

Now look at the last four weeks:

• 21,685 visitors
• 32,844 page views
• 1.36 average time per page view
• 0:57 average time on site
• 81.7% bounce rate
• 88.8% new visits

Here’s a graph of that December traffic (using Quantcast, another tool I recently started using):

Do you want to guess what caused the mountain?

On December 21, I wrote an article about a series of Facebook phishing scams, that at the time, had zero online references. My post now has 69 comments, with new ones appearing every other day.

While you spend an average 60 seconds reading my blog content (typically because you read one post and rarely click into multiple posts), every visitor to the Facebook scam page spent three minutes reading!

Like the cycle of news, blog content comes and goes. But if you write something at the right time, visitors will come. You don’t have to be an A-list blogger; you can be anyone. Just write it and capture the noise. Provide possible solutions. Offer a way for people to ask questions, whether by blog comment, email, or Facebook message (and I received all three).

If you do it right, something will go viral as that Facebook post did.

Enough people told each other, that they came and posted their thanks. Those comments don’t belong to bloggers, either. There are few blog links attached to their names. Most of their comments are attached to random email addresses on yahoo and hotmail. The bulk of those commenters were Facebook users–but if I have anything to say about it, they will become future bloggers.

Photo credit: _federico_

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