How I Got 28,000 Hits in One Day
“Every dog has it’s day”
It all started on Tuesday (4/14) when I was fooling around on YouTube and came across some funny The Price is Right Bloopers. After wasting a good hour looking and laughing at these clips, I decided that this would be a good idea for a post. After all, just about everyone has seen The Price is Right and been frustrated with a contestant’s bid. Turns out I was right.
After struggling to decide what 10 moments I thought were the funniest, I composed my post, The Ten Stupidest Moments in The Price is Right History and started to submit the post to various social bookmarking sites. I remember thinking to myself that this post would be sure to get some nice traffic via these social bookmarking sites. WRONG!!!! Guess how many Diggs my post got (and still has)? If you guessed one (the one I did) you would be correct. Submitting my post to Reddit, StumbleUpon, Mixx, and Propeller had similar disappointing results.
By Wednesday (4/15, I was growing further frustrated by my post’s lack of traffic and decided to surrender and just write a new post. After constructing and publishing this post, for some reason I decided to submit my Price is Right Post to popular humor sites such as Fark, College Humor, Gorilla Mask, and IamBored.com. I wasn’t very optimistic that this technique would lead to anything, but I figured I would give it a try.
Fast forward to about 2:30 on Thursday (4/16) when I noticed my traffic start to go crazy. I was on IamBored.com. Once I determined that I was not hallucinating, I started to analyze my traffic–I was getting about 900 hits per hour. I quickly edited my Price is Right post to include a welcome to IamBored.com visitors along with links to some of my more popular posts (Check it out, it is still there). By the end of the day i had almost 10,000 hits, shattering my previous record of 3,750. Needless to say, I was a happy camper and slept nicely with dreams of blogging glory.
Once I woke up on Friday, I practically ran to my computer to see how traffic was while I slept. I had expected that I would still be getting some nice traffic from IamBored and this certainly was the case. But as I more closely examined my sitemeter, I noticed that I was getting massive traffic from 2 other sources. Turns out I got on Gorilla Mask and more surprisingly, I was on Sports Illustrated’s Extra Mustard Blog. At one point, I was getting over 3,000 hits an hour and finished the day with over 28,000 hits.
Wondering what happens when you get that type of traffic? I always did, but never found any one that shared their story (My motive for this entire post). To begin with, I was pleasantly surprised that my blog didn’t crash due to the traffic. Good Job Bluehost!!!! I wonder how many more hits I could have got before it did crash? In addition, I learned that at least 15 ’smaller” blogs and message boards were linking to my post. Although I did not receive that much additional traffic (at least not yet) from these sources, I bet this will eventually help my Google search engine results.
Finally, and the question that most of you certainly have on your mind, how much money can you make with this type of traffic? Well, probably not as much as you think. Unfortunately, the traffic that I received had a very high bounce rate. People looked at my post, and then left. I am sure that adding the welcome message helped, but the fact is that the vast majority of visitors check out the post and then quickly hit the back arrow and returned to their original site to look an the next funny link. Still, I did sell a couple of Red Staplers via Amazon, made a $25 MoreNiche sale, and established a new record for The Red Stapler Chronicles in Adsense earnings.
Have you ever had a great traffic day? Did your site crash? Did you have a different strategy that made you more money?
Leave a comment so others (including me) can learn from your success.
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Filed under: Blogging Tips
Well, traffic from social media sites really inflate the traffic so quick. I think the fact that you made something wth adsense is good because most of the times visitors from those sites never cared about ads…
@Melvin–Very true, i was pleasantly surprised that i got that many adsense clicks. Usually ALL my adsense clicks are generated via visitors arriving from a google search.
Wow, cool story. I have a mixed martial arts blog that had a massive hit increase (close to 10000%) after Evan Tanner died last summer. This was because I was lucky enough to be one of the top three google image search hits for “Evan Tanner”. As far as a strategy for making money using Adsense goes, I have at times tried to create content around adwords that I know pay well. Instead of actively searching these terms out I let myself find them organically. For example if I notice the ads around certain content has a very high cost per click, I will try to create similar content hoping for similar ads. By allowing myself to find these terms naturally I don’t think I ever compromise the integrity of any of my sites.
I have a high traffic site that nets about $100 bucks a month. But my low traffic site gets close to that. Sometimes we have to consider our target audience. Some audiences just don’t click. BTW, traffic for both sites is generated organically.
I have at times tried to create content around adwords that I know pay well. Instead of actively searching these terms out I let myself find them organically
Be sure to block out your CTR on the adsense screenshot….. then delete this comment so Google doesn’;t know…
Good job on the massive amount of traffic!
I’ve decided that too many people are fighting over the big dogs. I think your a good example of using the smaller one’s and getting an increase in traffic. This I think will help the PR more then immediate ROI. What’s nice is an increase PR will equal in increased ROI over time. I think it’s a good investment of time to publish to the smaller ones to get the good volume of traffic.
That’s incredible! I hope I get as much traffic as you did from a video post. I am going to try something similar on my blog and hopefully see a fourth of what you saw. Regards!
Wow, are you sure this skill really boost your traffic to funny clips.
i really fascinating with your post and have bookmark it. Please follow up some advise so I can boost up my traffic too.
Thanks
Usually I feel that submitting to Social bookmarking sites yielded disappointing results maybe because of the competitive environment of the site and there are all types of issues coming around. Serious etc while sites like college humor etc are just for fun so people are keen to visit pages for to find funny articles. Anyway. Congrats
This post taught me one thing, to attract traffic you must go into their zone rather than expect them to come to you. For funny articles, bookmark them in such humor sites.