Posts That Keep On Giving

About three weeks ago, while viewing my Web stats, I noticed something interesting on one of my other blogs. A story I posted way back in December had suddenly become the top story for the day.

What is unusual about this post is that although I hadn’t previously checked how much traffic it was bringing in, it had never been near the top of the stats, so hadn’t jumped out at me as an effective post. Sure, the day I posted it, it received a quick spike in traffic, but after that, nothing major.

Now though, that one post has brought in somewhere around 30,000 new visitors to the site in the last three weeks and is regularly rating as the top post on most days. Even better, each visitor is averaging 4 page views per visit.

The story itself is not that good, I have, and do post much better content. When I wrote this particular post I set out with the intention of generating a lot of traffic and while the content may have been simple, it took some time to put it all together.

What’s The Story

So what caused this sudden boost in traffic for this ‘old’ post?

Several factors came together at the same time, but the primary one is that I redesigned my theme. The new theme seems to generate a lot more Google search traffic. So it would seem that with the previous theme, the post simply wasn’t being indexed as well by Google. It jsut goes to show the value of a good SEO enhanced theme.

Will It Last?

So how long do I expect this surge in traffic to last? Going by the stats of my other posts that rate quite highly, I expect this post to do the same. It will taper off and eventually drop down to bring in 300 - 400 new visitors a day, but that is still a nice healthy figure.

Capitalize

Now there is not a lot of point in generating traffic, if you are not prepared to take advantage of it. Rather then sit back and simply wait for the surge to drop, today I wrote another post along a similar thread to the previous one. Rather then simply wait for this post to be found by the search engines, or by readers looking at the related links, I put a link in each of these posts, promoting the other one. I also did a couple of other little things…

Now my new post is rating number two on my stats, not all that far behind the top rating one.

Know Thy Stats

Of course, none of this would be evident unless I was actively following my Website stats. I do this several times a day, and it takes nothing more then a quick glance at the dashboard to see how things are going. There are a lot of stats tools you can use for doing this. My favorite though is this one. I have posted about it previously here and I can highly recommend it as an invaluable tool to have.

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