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A Week of Good Fortune
July 12th, 2007 by Matt HugginsAt the beginning of June, I created a post entitled 55 Essential Articles Every Serious Blogger Should Read. The list includes a collection of useful blog posts that I learned a lot from, and I thought that my readers could get a lot of great information from them as well. As such, I decided to organize the links into one easily navigable spot.
I received a few comments and backlinks, but overall I received little more than what could be found for many of my other posts at the time. That all changed on the morning of Saturday, June 30th. That day, FreelanceSwitch, a great blog and freelance job finding service that I highly recommend, provided a link to my blog.
Because of the high number of readers that utilize FreelanceSwitch, I found myself receiving much more traffic than I ever received. Even Sunday, the quietest day of the week for websites, became my second highest day in traffic at the time.
Soon after finding my link on FreelanceSwitch, I found that my list reached the front page of the popular social bookmarking website del.icio.us, appearing in their hotlist. This resulted in my blog appearing in numerous aggregators such as popurls and doggdot.us.
Users of these sites started linking to the blog post in their own blogs. Some of them bookmarked it in del.icio.us, only to have it appear in their recent links widget on their blogs. In all, I received 1,907 visits and 3,462 page views on Saturday.
Fast forward one week. I wake up to find that I have yet another boost in traffic. This time it’s from LifeHacker, the 6th most popular blog in the world according to Technorati. Now I was excited about the traffic FreelanceSwitch and del.icio.us produced, but it was only a fraction of what Lifehacker ended up producing for this blog. On Saturday, I end up receiving 4,985 visits and 10,267 page views.
I’ve since received at least 100 trackbacks, pingbacks, and other forms of backlinks to the one post as a result of these big sites including my link on their blogs. In the process, I managed to earn more than three times the AdSense revenue within the first 9 days of July than I did throughout all of June.
The traffic continues to flow, and the numbers continue to grow. Here’s a breakdown of my traffic and RSS subscriber over this period.
Website Visitors:
RSS Subscribers:
I certainly hope the good fortune continues, but it won’t happen without continuing to post quality content. If there’s anything you’re especially interested in learning more about, please let me know.
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July 12th, 2007 at 1:34 am
Congratulations!!! I’m so proud of you.
July 12th, 2007 at 1:59 am
I checked your site out on Alexa today, amazing! Your success, Matt, is inevitable. And you are making this all happen by posting extremely high quality and helpful content, and you are a nice guy to boot. So many make money blogging sites are cocky and not helpful in the end, they just want to keep you coming back to increase their revenue. You on the other hand genuinely want to show people how they can benefit from blogging. Again, incredible bang-up splendid blog!
July 12th, 2007 at 2:11 am
Thanks to both of you, I really appreciate it! You’re too kind.
July 12th, 2007 at 2:13 am
That’s awesome news! I’m glad we could play a part in that!!
July 12th, 2007 at 2:21 am
Thanks, Collis! I just realized that I forgot to mention in the post that my Technorati rank jumped from about 75,000 to under 20,000. Thanks for linking to me, I really appreciate it. Keep up the good work on FreelanceSwitch!
July 12th, 2007 at 8:23 am
Wow that’s a huge jump, good job! It was a quality article, but I’ll tell Cyan you said thanks, I was just browsing technorati when I came across this post and was like yay!
July 16th, 2007 at 3:14 am
[...] Similarly, I had the problem of a low RSS count that continued to rise slowly but steadily until I recently had somewhat of a big break. I wouldn’t have had the traffic needed for such a boost without having a little luck on my [...]
July 16th, 2007 at 11:23 pm
Huh…when I linked to that article I had no idea you were so popular..
I was actually planning to write an article similar to that with all the links I’d collected, but I found yours and you’d done such a good job I figured there wasn’t much point. I guess the tough part is getting some of those readers to hang-on now that they’ve been exposed to your site…
July 16th, 2007 at 11:29 pm
Thanks, Zen.
I managed to get some subscribers through the various sources. My FeedBurner count jumped from a little over 70 to about 325. It’s still growing a bit, but not nearly as much as it did during the initial leaps in traffic.
August 1st, 2007 at 11:53 am
[...] earn more than what I earned during both May and June this year, much of which is attributable to a piece of linkbait that found its way around the blogosphere. The final tally for July is $112.42, which can be seen [...]