Hey there everyone.
Notice anything new about the site?
I hope to God you said yes...
Yeah, I added a new flash banner to the site, which only appears on the homepage. It features an animated and compact version of the main header with one of my rock characters, Green, going on a "stroll" through New York City. The .swf uses cookies to tell if you've already seen the animation through, and if you have, it won't play every other time that you visit the site. So if you want to see it again, just hit the 'Replay" button! I think it came out pretty well.
Alrighty. Time to get on topic. Story time. So sit back and be prepared to be told a story.
I woke up yesterday morning and went online at my usual time of around 8am. I usually check up on my daily comics and favorite blogs at this time. This is also the time that I usually write ForTheLoses' daily post.
Anyway, I woke up and went onto ForTheLose to find that there was already a very noticeable increase in traffic, especially for so early in the day. I didn't think much of it and wrote my post for that day. I then went on with my day with stuff like taking a shower and eating breakfast, you know, those things. I came back to the site around 11am to find that the traffic was already past the daily average for the entire day. This is when I became curious.
I checked out the WordPress Stats plugin I have installed and what I saw shocked me (in a good way). Apparently, a page on the popular social media network StumbleUpon was sending tons of traffic my way. I was pretty baffled, but at the same time, pretty freakin' happy. I turned to making my own account on StumbleUpon and searching for where exactly all these users were finding my site from. (I found the url to the stumbled ForTheLose.org page, which is here.) What I couldn't figure out (and never did) was why yesterday? I saw that ForTheLose.org was stumbled 3 months ago with not even a single hit being returned. Then, all of a sudden, boom!... 500+ unique visits in one day... Maybe one of you guys can let me in on how exactly this works.
After I figured out how I was getting all of this traffic, I began optimizing the site a little bit. I had already uploaded the new flash banner on the home page (which if you ask me, I did on the perfect day... it gave a good first impression to all the new visitors). If you haven't noticed, I also added shnazzy Digg It and Stumble It buttons to the bottom of each post to help you guys favorite the content you find on the site. I then went around the site and spent around 30 minutes stumbling and digging all of the posts on the site. Yeah, it was a long and boring process, but I got it done.
At 6pm when I checked up on the site again, I noticed there were 14 people online at the same time. For such a small website, I thought that was really cool. As I looked over the site and its pages, I noticed that that number grew. I became intrigued and kept refreshing the page and taking screenshots. I couldn't believe my eyes. The below pic illustrates what I saw.
That's right. There were 50 people on ForTheLose.org at one time. This is the point in time that I became aware of the fact that I was salivating all over myself. I snapped out of it and looked at WordPress Stats again. Not only did ForTheLose.org already have 300+ hits from the original stumbled article, but it also had 90+ hits from one of the articles I stumbled that morning! I refreshed a few times and noticed that 90 quickly entering the 100's. Then then 110's. I couldn't believe that all of this traffic was from two posts that had been submitted to a social network. It was really unbelieveable.
By the end of the day, ForTheLose had received over 840 unique visits. I couldn't be more happy at this outcome. This is great publicity for the site and I hope many of the people that visited the site yesterday have bookmarked it or even subscribed to the RSS Feed.
I started Google'ing around, looking for similar "incidents" on other blogs. I found quite a few articles on the subject, and have concluded that this is a semi-normal occurrence. If you write quality content and put care into your work, your viewers will promote your stuff on their own. Though, it is reasonable to say that pictures and videos are the types of media that get more attention then posts and news articles. Nonetheless, this is how so many people find success with social networks. I can tell you this whole experience definitely made me rethink my ideas on sites like StumbleUpon and Digg.
I hope you guys enjoyed this post and have learned something from it. If you really liked it, why don't you stumble it 
?
Stumbleupon.com can create such a surge of traffic to your site, you’ll think something is broken. That’s what happened to me the first time someone stumbled one of my pages.
- DebtPrison.net
If you liked this post, stay updated. Follow me on Twitter or subscribe to our RSS Feed via email.
Post Tags: blog tips, stumbleupon
Wow....that is great news man. It's really inspiring. I haven't used digg or other networks at all because I figured it was a waster of time. After reading this article however.
THANKS