The Writer’s Coin

Early on in the life of this blog, I got lucky. A post I wrote about 401(k) accounts, somehow got linked to at the bottom of a Wall Street Journal post and I saw a spike in traffic. It was exciting and encouraging because it gave me a chance to see what can happen if your content is decent and you have a little luck come your way.

Last week I had some more luck come my way: I broke all kinds of traffic records for this blog and I broke them by A LOT. My goal has always been to slowly increase my traffic from month to month. I was actually telling M about this goal and how I just managed to “make it” on the last day of July. Then August came and one post got crazy amounts of traffic that made everything I’d gotten until then seem like chump change. Check out the month-to-month numbers:

From averaging just a smidge over 4,000 visits a month, I’ve already gotten over 30,000 hits and the month isn’t even over yet. What was the brilliant post that got me all this traffic? A little something I wrote about Marilyn Monroe on the cover of Poets & Writers. It was an afterthought. Who knew? Here’s what the daily breakdown looks like around the day it hit:

Suffice to say, I was VERY excited. I didn’t even know it was possible for this many people to visit the site, let alone for a “simple” post on Marilyn Monroe. With that, here are the lessons I’ve learned from all this insanity:

• Every post counts: When I wrote the Marilyn post, I did so only because I liked the picture. I didn’t think it was a particularly useful post or had a lot of meat to it, but I wrote it anyway.
• Networking is essential: I sifted through all the traffic data and it all started with someone linking to me from Librarything.com. I couldn’t find out who started it, but I’m eternally thankful.
• There are LOTS of people on the Internet: Who knew that 30,000 people would come to my site? This is a little bit of naiveté on my part. I mean come on, I’ve seen the numbers the big bloggers get out there so what’s to stop me from attracting that kind of traffic? This just opened my eyes to the possibilities.
• Be ready at all times: Luckily, I have been cleaning up the site and looking into additional ad opportunities before all this happened. Otherwise I would’ve been scrambling to try to make changes to make the site “better” as this rush of people came along.
• Blogging is fun: Getting this many people to read what you’re writing and to comment on it is what it’s all about. The more people show up, the merrier this whole thing gets.

The downside? I have to get lucky again next month if I’m going to increase my traffic for September. Help me out and tell everyone you know to come check me out, otherwise I’m doomed!

Tags: Blogging, librarything.com, marilyn monroe, traffic