What gave you your biggest traffic burst?
We all try various methods of promoting our blogs. Some work, some don’t and sometimes we get traffic from the strangest of places without even doing anything.
I’d love to hear what has given you your biggest traffic burst. I’m not necessarily talking about the day you had your highest traffic level, I’m talking about the day where you saw traffic double or even treble your normal daily average.
How did you get this traffic burst?
- Did you get a lot of hits from search engines because of a strange keyword or phrase?
- Were you first to break the news about a big event?
- Did you purchase advertising on another site and see a big jump in traffic?
- Did you get a link from a high traffic website? (perhaps via a guest post)
- Did you get to the front page of digg or some other social media site?
I think it will be interesting to see the different ways bloggers got traffic. I’m sure we can all learn something from each other 
What gave BloggingTips it’s biggest traffic burst?
I’ll start us all off by telling you all how BloggingTips saw it’s biggest traffic burst
On November 24th 2007 Deborah Ng from Freelance Writing Jobs wrote a post on 7BabesABlogging called ‘12 Reasons to Hate Football‘. The article seemed to get up a lot of people noses and popular site Fark posted a link to it. Not only did her original post get lots of negative comments, attacks and abuse in the comment area, someone posted a link to her Blogging Tips post and thousands of farkers visited the post and left abusive messages. Deborah told me about all of this at the time so I removed the post and put it back online a few days later til it calmed down.
The traffic from Fark was unbelievable. From one commentator putting a link to BloggingTips in the comment area, unique visitors was more than 5 times the usual amount.
Here are the traffic stats the days before, during and after the traffic burst :
Since the traffic was not targeted, my daily traffic returned to normal soon after the whole affair.
What gave you your biggest traffic burst?
As you can see from my example, sometimes traffic bursts aren’t planned or expected and many times the traffic isn’t targeted either.
Leave a comment and tell us how you got your biggest traffic burst
Pradeep | May 12th, 2008 at 6:22 am #
I dont remember the date and time but my bigest taffic burst was last month when i submitted my article If Content is King Comment is prince to Digg and Blog Engage
i got more then 600 hits and 225 unique visitor in one day and 25 feed subscriber which is highest so far for my 3 month old blog
now day i get 300 page view and around 50/60 uniquie visitors
Frugal Dad | May 12th, 2008 at 8:21 am #
In March of this year my article, “How to Build a Square Foot Garden” was featured from LifeHacker.org, and subsequently made the front page of del.ic.ious and SU. It was a wild ride for my small blog (at the time), bringing in aver 12,000 uniques over a 24-hour period. I still see some occasional residual traffic from that one mention.
JunkMale | May 12th, 2008 at 8:32 am #
My blog used to average 20-30 hits. When I posted this entry noting the similarities between certain presidential campaign posters and images of Che Guevara, all of a sudden, our blog traffic quadrupled to the still-relatively-small (but large for us) number of around 80-90 hits per day. We still get plenty of traffic from Google image searches. I can’t imagine why though, but I still like the “publicity.”
superjason | May 12th, 2008 at 9:04 am #
My site SimpleTracking.com was mentioned on Digg, reddit, Fark, and even the official Google blog. All of them brought a lot of traffic!
Kristen | May 12th, 2008 at 9:13 am #
I’m still green to blogging world, so haven’t really had this happen in a significant way yet.
But, these snippets on the experiences you guys have had are an invaluable resource as I plan to ramp up everything I’ve been doing with my blog over the next couple of weeks.
JamieO | May 12th, 2008 at 9:19 am #
A) A comment on a ProBlogger contest which won me a free book and link to my page on the subsequent contest announcement generated a week of massive traffic compared to my normal levels.
B) A recent article on The Triangle Mystery netted a huge spike in traffic from Google as people begin searching for clues to this potential ARG. While the quality of traffic (time spent on site, interest in my niche of web design/development) was low, I did see a few new RSS subscriptions in the following days.
Summary: Comment on leading blogs and write about topical items can do good things for your traffic.
Kevin | May 12th, 2008 at 9:22 am #
Some good comments so far. Links on larger blogs and traffic from social media seem to be the highest so far
Geoffrey Philp | May 12th, 2008 at 9:43 am #
Normally, I get about 150 visitors per day on my blog, but last weekI had huge spike in visitors, and they all came from Castrocopia because of my post on Bob Marley’s “I Shot the Sheriff.”
Jason Castro sang “I Shot the Sheriff” on American Idol and many of Castrocopia’s readers who were looking for an interpretation of Bob’s lyrics followed the link to my site. I had an increase of more than 500% of site visits.
All I can say is give thanks to Jason Castro for singing “I Shot the Sheriff”and to Castrocopia for linking to my blog.
Maybe if I’m lucky, more American Idol singers will choose some other songs from Bob’s repertoire, and I’ll have even more visitors to the site.
Now, if I can only find a way so that they’ll come back when I publish my latest novel, Virtual Yardies.
Vaibhav | May 12th, 2008 at 10:47 am #
Its a painfully slow process but i guess Dig It proves to get a better audience.
I’m still experimenting, time will tell.
Apart from that, nothing beats timely posts and the content.
http://www.callingallgeeks.blogspot.com
David Shaw | May 12th, 2008 at 11:23 am #
I have had a big traffic jump today.
Earlier I posted my post: Related Post Plugin Can Boost Page Views
The topic got stumbled and has brought in ALOT of traffic in around a few hours.
Could be one of my blogs best days so far!
Kevin | May 12th, 2008 at 11:35 am #
Geoffrey - Thats the kind of traffic burst which is difficult to plan. I check my keywords from time to time and see traffic from the strangest of searches!
David Shaw - I’ve added your post to tomorrows link roundup
FabioG3 | May 13th, 2008 at 6:09 am #
A recent interview to an italian TopBlogger (which linked me in a post) and an interview with Shoemoney are the posts that brought me the more traffic. Way much more than anything else, interviews worked for me.
Brandon | May 13th, 2008 at 1:34 pm #
A while back I contacted the Design Float people with my idea for Design Float to allow for customization of their buttons and, since I have more of a personal blog, I thought I may as well post it and submit it to Design Float for some feedback from other users.
The next morning I found my submission in my RSS reader (I’m only subscribed to the front page feed)! So with some checking of my Wordpress Stats I’d seen that my blog had received more then ten times the usual amount of traffic (Screenshot)!
Zoobie Joy | May 13th, 2008 at 5:37 pm #
Social Sites like SU, Digg, Propeller gave me a lot of traffic..also micro blogging sites like Jaiku and Twitter are worth the try..^^
Pedro | May 13th, 2008 at 10:13 pm #
Actually I could see how the traffic of multiplied by four yesterday because somebody submitted one of my posts to .
Jeffro2pt0 | May 14th, 2008 at 4:01 am #
Hey Kevin, thanks for bringing this question up, I had fun answering it. I answered the question in the form of a blog post which will probably end up as a trackback link here. All in all, I got the most traffic to my blog via a method in which I didn’t do intending to get traffic. I think it will be an eye opener for those that use wordpress.
Britney | July 10th, 2008 at 12:15 pm #
This is going to sound funny, but Britney Spears gave me most of my skyrocketed traffic. Being that I have the same first name as her, back when she shaved her head and everyone was googling her, I got tons of hits. Then as the publicity about it died down, so did my hits.