This week I saw my highest weekend site traffic. I will share with you my traffic sources and lessons I learnt over these few days. My Youtube tools post was posted on del.icio.us and the bookmark sharing frenzy started. It was soon amongst the top 5 most popular posts on del.icio.us and kept appearing on the front page off and on.
The fun about getting featured on del.icio.us/popular is that you automatically get listed on several sites which track their popular feed like popurls, theweblist and Diggdot which send more visitors your way. And then it suddenly disappeared from the del.icio.us popular as I watched and that was the end of their traffic. Around 4000 visitors came that way.
[Sitemeter data over the week]
Emily Chang was very kind to Ehub me, and Wendy Boswell at Lifehacker always sends Lifehackers my way (2000 visitors are here and more are still coming till the new week’s brimming Lifehacker posts drives us off the front page).
The surprise site traffic source was Stumbleupon which sent the highest traffic my way of over 6000 visitors. Stumblers are a serious source of traffic and if you like suggesting your site to various social bookmarking networks, get a stumbleupon link today. They like it, suggest it and now you prepare your server.
Yes, I was digged too! But the surprising part was that the Digg referred traffic was not high as expected compared to the other sources (just about 5000). It is primarily because the post was promoted as a top digg after 2-3 days of submission, or maybe it got driven off the front page too quickly. Even my Digg live bookmark on Firefox and feed reader did not even pick it up after a few hours. Some diggs are still tricking through…
Usually traffic is low on weekends. If this chain of events had started on a weekday, I expect the traffic would be double of what it is. And the buzz is still spreading…
Lessons learnt
Recognize the power of StumbleUpon. Everyone talks about getting Del.icio.used, Farked, Slashdotted, Instalanched and Digged. StumbleUpon is still an underestimated source of site traffic. Get StumbleUpon today (works on IE and firefox both).
Add a Digg this button. Sites disappear from the Digg front page quickly. Give visitors a chance to find your site on Digg and digg it. Let the chain reaction continue. More digg tools for that.
Post Your Best Article Early in the week. Take advantage of the weekdays. When the buzz picks up and traffic starts to roll, you do not want your possible new readers enjoying their Sunday holiday, and come back to never see your site because the buzz has already ended and you are off the front pages of most top sites. The feed readers are so full over the weekend that readers barely have the time to skip over hundreds of feeds.
Prepare Your Site for the Traffic – Remove those bandwidth hogging images and scripts. You want a quick loading bandwidth efficient page. Many free image hosting sites may block your nice images into big block displaying “this image has exceeded its bandwidth quota”. Get a good web host – an unreliable crashed server can undo the entire effect of the buzz you generated. There are more ways to prepare for this.
Note: These approximate traffic estimates are provided by MyBlogLog over a period of 3 days.
Update: Guess who linked us at 2AM on Sunday IST? I don’t know.
Update 2: Many of you emailed to ask about the revenue generated. Limited by the amount of information I can disclose as per Google Adsense terms, all I can say is that the click through rate (CTR) was half, eCPM was half, but the total earnings doubled as the traffic tripled that day! I wish every day was the same…