How this Blog received 100,000 Pageviews in 14 Days
Glen Allsopp / 
20 Comments / 
October 8th, 2007 / 
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On a certain day in June 2006 I had been awake 36 hours, I finished the 1st ever full revision of the ViperChill site and was ready to sleep. Funnily enough that first revision was offering ‘Search Engine Optimized’ Website templates, simply because I was told it would earn me a lot of money. I have no interest in website design, you have to realise what you love doing.
Once you realise what you love doing, you can start doing it. I’ve started to realise that with this site, I love doing SEO & Social Media, I like interacting with others on the subject just as much, but it’s pretty rare to find someone my age with the same interests so I don’t tend to bring it up into a conversation. One of the reasons this blog received 100k pageviews over the last 2 weeks was because I started writing about what I loved, and it showed.
Click the Image for a bigger View
I hate it when people talk about their traffic stats and never show any proof so there’s an image. I also hate it when people talk about how much traffic they received and don’t tell you exactly where it came from. So here’s the referrers:
(Remember these are stats from a 14 day Period)
- StumbleUpon: 41,182 Visits
- Digg: 9,389 Visits (Just the First Day of Traffic Counted)
- Direct: 4,695 Visits
- Sphinn: 618 Visits
- Google: 357 Visits
Over a two week period between August 26th and September 10th these were the top 5 Referrs to ViperChill.com. Please note that these are visits and not pageviews, some traffic has a terrible bounce rate while traffic from other sources tends to stick around.
What caused the traffic?
It’s all well and good knowing where traffic is coming from, but it’s certainly a lot more interesting to know where it’s going too. There have been two real posts on this blog that drove the majority of the traffic, I’ll go into them in a little more detail.
Analysis Top 50 StumbleUpon Users
This was the first post that really started the traffic spike, so far this as received over 33,000 pageviews for this one blog post. The top 5 referrs to this were:
- StumbleUpon: 30,724 pageviews
- Direct: 2,256 pageviews
- Problogger: 59 pageviews
- Google: 58 pageviews
- Danawallert: 48 pageviews
As you can see, StumbleUpon sent a lot of traffic to this page, this was because it was StumbleUpon related in my opinion coupled with the fact that a lot of people spent the time reviewing it and giving it a thumbs up. Due to this it was featured on the SU buzz page.
This post was very similar to the last one but focused on a different site. No surprise that it didn’t do aswell on StumbleUpon but it did very well on Digg. This has received over 17,000 pageviews, here’s how the top 5 referrers match up.
- Digg: 12,454 pageviews
- StumbleUpon: 4,240 pageviews
- Direct: 682 pageviews
- Sphinn: 151 pageviews
- Popurls: 120 pageviews
As you can see the traffic was a little different for this one and it certainly depends who picks up your content. The numbers are a little more even compared to the large spike with the StumbleUpon post.
Summary
Two blog posts brought over 50k pageviews on their own, just from social media traffic. Notice how the search engine’s barely brought any traffic and if people hadn’t submitted the content out there or wrote about it on blogs I would have only received 1% of the traffic this site got overall.
I won’t deny that these posts took a very long time to write, but shouldn’t you be proud of everything you write on your blog? Aren’t your readers worth the time and isn’t the potential results worth testing? Go for it, and be surprised.
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That is a lot of traffic! Those posts are very nice to though! good job!
Yeah it is, but it’s only because the effort put into the content
Glen - Congrats on all of your success! Writing about what you love certainly brings out the best in you.
Those were two excellent posts but I doubt that success can be repeated as effectively in the future because they are the kinds of posts that once done, it’s done. Well done though, they certainly brought my attention to this blog and I’m a subscriber now
Thanks caroline; and you are very right. I have a lot of other blog posts that I think could do well but I’m not sure the success of those two will ever be beaten.
Thanks for stopping by and subscribing
Caroline, the patterns that were in the two posts can be reused for other topics, etc, to drive traffic from the same and other websites.
P.S. “Subscribe to comments via email” is unchecked, “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail” is checked. What is all this about? I’d prefer to have one of the two and unchecked
Yuri it’s something to do with the brians threaded comments I’m using here, really not sure what it’s all about
I will look into it this weekend
@Yuri, I’m not so sure. The key thing that made these two posts popular is that the traffic came from huge social media sites and the subject material was about those same sites. Unless there are other similar sources of traffic in other niches, I doubt the level of success would be enjoyed.
The effort is apparent in your posts. I’m sure you’re proud of them, this one included.
How was the flight?
Flights were good thanks, pretty long but they were good
I’ve learnt a lot here already so there’s some good stuff to come, stay tuned
Well done Glen. I empathize with what you say about writing about what you love. Agree 100%.
@ Yuri and Caroline: I think Caroline is right from a strict point of view that you can’t write again about the top 50 stumblers. But you can do the same with other social networks. SU and Digg are just two of hundreds of popular social sites, and most likely their users like to read and talk about themselves.
But furthermore, we shouldn’t see this from such a narrow point of view. The lesson here is not “One should write about the top users of X network”.
The lesson here IMO is “Communities like to read, talk and comment about themselves”.
The lesson here IMO is “Communities like to read, talk and comment about themselves”.
I agree and I think that’s definitely been pointed out from the success that I had.
[...] Good tactics on getting traffic to your blog, How this Blog received 100,000 Pageviews in 14 Days. [...]
Hi Glenn,
Thanks for your comment. I’m a big fan of your work, so look for more links back to your site!
Cheers!
Man U Fan
Man U Fan, sorry to hear it :p
Glad you like the content here, thanks for stopping by
My blog is too new to see this kind of traffic. I average about 50 views/day after blogging less than 2 months.
I just cant wait for the day my blog sees the kind of numbers your sees.
Great post!
Thanks untechy, just keep working hard at producing good content and you will get there
That’s great.
Maybe I can make it too, my blog is still young
Best
S*
Of course Silvia, just keep working hard
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