100%+ Traffic Increase
June 3rd, 2005 by Steve Pavlina
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One of the Q2 goals I set at the beginning of April was to achieve a certain level of web traffic by the end of the second quarter. My goal was to achieve a 40% traffic increase (measured in terms of unique visitors per month) over the 3-month period between March 31 and June 30. This meant about a 12% increase per month with compounding, which I felt was ambitious but achievable.
April traffic increased by only 4% over March, but May yielded an 86% increase on top of April, for a compound 94% increase from March to May. Moreover June traffic (and we’re not even 3 days into the month) has almost surpassed May’s total traffic already, so the overall quarterly traffic growth will be way beyond 100%. The site was already getting a decent level of traffic before this increase, but now there are tens of thousands more unique visitors than there were in March.
So how was this achieved?
While I’d love to take credit for it and have been putting some marketing effort into this site, most of this traffic surge was beyond my expectations and planning. A couple of recent blog posts, How to Become an Early Riser and How to Give Up Coffee, somehow exploded like ideaviruses. New links to these posts from other blogs and forums sprouted everywhere, and within days the first post was picked up by kottke.org, and the second by fark.com, the #14 and #5 blogs according to Technorati’s top 100. So thanks for all the traffic, Jason and Drew!
But despite the sharp traffic spikes generated by those two major sites, most of the new traffic seems to have come from the long tail of large numbers of small and medium-sized blogs. I can partially track how mention of these posts spread from blog to forum to blog almost like a virus. These posts also reached top 10 spots on some sites that track popular blog posts. The early riser post made it to #2 on the popular list on del.icio.us and received well over 100 “diggs” on digg.com.
And this “virus” is still in its infectious stage.
I must say this has me a bit stumped. I thought these were relatively benign posts, and of all the things I’ve written, I never would have suspected that these would be the ones that would tip. If anyone can explain why these posts are so popular, I’m all ears — especially if you’re one of the fellow bloggers who linked to one or both of them. Is it really that hard for some people to wake up early?
I’ve also received a surge in email from people applying these ideas and telling me about their results thus far, most of it extremely positive. This included some amusing flames. I enjoy flames that are funny, like the image on the left in referring to my post about giving up coffee. LOL.
Consequently, most of the people now reading this blog are new to it, having been aware of this site for less than two weeks. So if you’re one of them, welcome! Please take note of the free articles section of the site if you haven’t done so already. The articles tend to be longer and more structured than blog entries. I recommend starting wtih The Courage to Live Consciously, which is designed to get you thinking about your own personal growth from a high level of awareness.
June 3rd, 2005 at 5:01 pm
There is a growing community of blogs and newsgroups interested in low tech, non gimmicky self improvement techniques or “life hacks”. News spreads fast through these RSS and del.icio.us savvy communities.
June 3rd, 2005 at 6:56 pm
You want to know why those posts were popular?
Because they are simple and focused. I really enjoy a lot of your posts about motivation and discipline, but a lot of that is spread over a wide topic area of self-improvement. Your posts on rising early were focused, giving results to a specific problem people face. Sounds benign, but I think those little tips might just be the things to grab people’s attention.
Things like improving confidence and self-discipline are good, but I think you’ll find the most attention when you address an issue that most people aren’t addressing. Something benign or simple. Stuff like doing a post on getting through the monotony of housework? Sounds pretty benign, but this is the kind of info that is less common.
Thats my reasoning at least. I suppose controversy would work well too (many of the replies about coffee/sleep were arguing about why you needed to give up the habit?).
Good luck, I’ll keep reading.
June 3rd, 2005 at 7:11 pm
I came across your blog last week via a link to your Early Riser post on del.ico.us. I’ve always had a notion that morning people were “born that way,” so the idea that you could set out to become one intrigued me. Plus, I’m a very practical kind of guy, so the “How to” part also appealed to me.
Since then I’ve been reading all of your earlier blog entries, and I absolutely love it. I’m at a point where I feel that I want (and need) to pursue personal development, and your articles are providing an excellent road map. Please keep up the great work.
By the way, are you familiar with Walter Russell? I see a lot of similarities between your observations and his. One of his famous quotes is “Mediocrity is self-inflicted; genius is self-bestowed. The choice is yours.” If you’re interested, there’s an online biography of him available at http://philosophy.org/mwt/.
Thanks again!
June 3rd, 2005 at 10:15 pm
I don’t know much about the rough-and-tumble world of Web marketing, but there’s always the optimistic interpretation: traffic’s going up because you’re writing useful, clear posts with content that people haven’t heard before.
One idea for another boost: put selected past posts somewhere prominent. If people see more of your best content after they first come to the site, that might help them get hooked. Joel Spolsky’s archive page was critical to getting me hooked on his fluffypuff blog.
Now, some scattershot ideas about what made this post pop.
The 30-day challenge seems like a really excellent way to start a good habit — well-considered, well-explained, and something people haven’t seen all over the Web already. (Quite unfortunately, I just didn’t *do* it.) From the comment count, it looks like it did quite well but not as well as the early-riser post. There are lots of possible reasons: dumb luck (those influential linkers just happened to see *this* one), lots of interest in rising early, a larger base of regular visitors to start spreading it, round-the-clock forwarding by insomniacs…
The personal story you led with is engaging as personal stories often are, and framing your idea as transcending two schools of thought and based in experience helps your credibility. And the early-riser post was about half as long as the 30-day challenge one.
Something appealing about personal development is that it gives people a vision of being who they want to be, which is a bigger thing than doing some single task. The early-riser post hits that desire pretty squarely (”Are morning people born or made?”). Also, it’s about half as long as the 30-days post.
Maybe it was a problem that the 30-day goal wasn’t concrete — maybe “change the thing you most want to change” is philosophically the right goal, but more people will try out a concrete suggestion than make their own choice. Maybe sad, but maybe true. Or maybe the title “How to become an early riser” gives readers an instant, believable idea of the article’s value proposition more than “30 days to success” does.
June 3rd, 2005 at 11:23 pm
>> Is it really that hard for some people to wake up early?
Yes!
June 4th, 2005 at 12:39 am
Hey Steve, I am one of those bloggers… however…I posted the one about procrastination…. one of your biggest forums that seems to get a lot of discussion about you in the past 2 weeks is http://www.newstoday.com which is basically made up of the creative community.
Our discussion was about sleep habits and how waking up in the morning tired was a real problem. I had originally posted that I was feeling sick in the morning when I was going to bed early but if I went to bed at a later time and woke up early I wasnt feeling sick. The discussion then went on that I had trained my body to work on less sleep and that more sleep was affecting me adversely.
I started reading all of your articles in the past couple of days and I actually have done no work because of it and I am feeling better already. I am taking the day off tomorrow as part of an experiment. Your blog is a well of Tony Robbins type stuff for free.
I have been blogging for 3 years but I am getting more involved in it now. I look forward to reading more of your articles and posts.
June 4th, 2005 at 12:55 am
Steve, the “How to Become an Early Riser” article is very popular because it’s a problem everybody has, and this problem is pretty disturbing from them. Almost ALL of my friends have this problem.
So, if you can manage to find out which problems 90% of the people have, and blog about them, then you can get a hell of a lot of traffic, and in the mean time help a hell of a lot of people.
June 4th, 2005 at 1:14 am
I hope to have interesting enough material on my site to one day achieve high traffic flow such as yourself. This will take time of course, any advise?
June 4th, 2005 at 3:31 am
I found your site on the “popular” del.icio.us rss feed. Nathan above is right on.
“Becoming an early riser” is what got me. I’ve been wanting to become an early riser for a long time, but never really started trying… I’m notorious for going to sleep late at night. So when you described yourself as being like that in the past, it really struck me. Hopefully 30 days from now, I can claim I’m an early riser.
If this works out for me and stick with it for a year I’m definitely buying your book.
June 4th, 2005 at 6:30 am
People are fascinated by sleep. The same thing happened to me. When I started Circadiana (http://circadiana.blogspot.com/), I got 17000 hits in the FIRST WEEK of its existence! How? I wrote a post “Everything you always wanted to know about sleep but were too afraid to ask”, which was immediately linked by BoingBoing and Andrew Sullivan, followed by a looooong tail of blogs, livejournals and forums, and high listing on Delicious and other news-aggregators. To this day, several months later, that post is still the most popular. I get 85 hits/day even when I take a break in posting for several days in a row, and it is mostly to this post. Of course, having a whole blog devoted to sleep makes my blog very popular with Google, too. Circadiana gets far more hits from Google than my “home” blog, Science And Politics.
Also, being in the Carnival of Education may have helped this post of yours, as it has helped me with some posts that I placed on carnivals.
June 4th, 2005 at 7:49 am
Congratulations. I think each us of in some way are looking to change ie replace habits. Encouragement in the way of sharing your experience is invaluable.
Thanks
June 4th, 2005 at 7:51 am
Steve,
I think the popularity of your coffee and early rising entries stems from:
1) Two very popular self-improvement topics
2) Your very readable, no nonsense writing style
3) Sound advice with ‘new news’ content
Reasons 2) and 3) are generally true of all your writing, which is why I like your blog so much. Keep up the great work, and thanks!
June 4th, 2005 at 9:28 am
@Coturnix: I’ve been submitting posts to a number of blog carnivals, but I haven’t seen any of them produce a major surge in traffic — most of them generate a few dozen new visitors. It’s all relative though. As traffic increases you need a lot more visitors to create a spike. 1000 extra visitors in a day wouldn’t be much of a spike for this blog and wouldn’t even be noticed by A-list blogs, but it would surely be a major surge for a smaller blog.
@Dustin: Patience certainly, but beyond that I think it helps to create a balance between sharing part of your own life and sharing ideas that could help other people. If you err on the side of talking too much about yourself, the blog becomes merely a narcissistic outlet. But on the other hand, if you never share any personal information, then it’s hard to build rapport and trust because the posts sound too preachy. I’m still working out the right balance between the two, but I think it helps to make blended posts that include personal details while also focusing on how to benefit the reader. Both the coffee and early riser posts fit that pattern.
June 4th, 2005 at 12:19 pm
Hey Steve, congratulations on the traffic and the incredible ride to the top. I’ve posted a theory why your sleep post was so popular and another on how I think it happened over on my blog. Both are a little long for a comment. You have definitely stumbled on something here. Keep up the great work.
John
June 4th, 2005 at 8:01 pm
Reasons? Clear writing, realistic plan, timely topic. Thanks!
June 4th, 2005 at 9:11 pm
That is so cool, Steve. Congratulations! I noticed that some topics are certainly hotter than others – my two biggest traffic magnets have been a post on the Moleskine notebook, and another on how I lost 60 pounds in the last year.
Keep up the great work!
June 5th, 2005 at 6:23 am
Congrats on the traffic. The coffee one I’m not entirely sure why that took off, althought it may have been triggered in part by the early morning rising one. (I don’t know which came first but I know I scrolled down for earlier entries. The coffee ideas seemed familar to me but some of the arguments of why to quit and how it affects your thinking really made me think.
The waking up post was actually somewhat revolutionary to me. I know a lot of people want to “fix their sleeping patterns” but they know the “Just have to get to bed early” and then flog themselves for failing and give up. Turning the deadline around (wake at alarm – no matter what) and making “awareness of sleepyness the evening factor is brilliant. All those “I’ll take meletonin and I’m still not sleeping” nights are not necessary and waking up at 5 is possible.
June 6th, 2005 at 1:04 pm
Congratulations on your Web success!
It’s probably a health thing that makes the coffee and early rising posts so popular. We’re a very health-conscious nation right now, and people are starting to get it that they need better rest, and that they need to cut their addictions.
No matter why or why not, though, it’s nice to have a focused Web site to go to while I’m wasting away at work, to help reprioritize. Though there have been a lot of ancilliary things going on in my life right now, a few of your articles have certainly helped me focus more. I unfortunately can’t credit you or any particular article of yours for this, but you might want to know that since I’ve started reading your Web site and thinking about the general topics you’ve introduced (which I’ve never really thought about before), I’ve negotiated myself a significant raise and successfully held to my new workout routine.
Knowing what you want and being able to visualize success has an amazing impact.
June 6th, 2005 at 1:33 pm
This may have already been said above, but I think one of the reasons your early riser and coffee blog topics were so popular is because these topics are so widely accessible and also not too controversial. The topics are easy for other people to recommend on their own blog sites, without worrying about getting too much pushback from their own readers.
For example, if I really like the music of a particular band and I really want to try get my friends into the band’s music as well, I’m going to recommend they listen to one of the band’s more “poppy” top-40 type songs that generally more widely accessible. As opposed to recommending they listen to some of the band’s more advanced or more experimental songs. So my hope is that if my friends like the “poppy” song that I originally recommended, maybe they will eventually come to appreciate the rest of the album. Or maybe they won’t.
June 13th, 2005 at 1:03 pm
I’ve been reading your… Insights for a while now, since 2003 or so, starting from Dexterity.com. While I’ve had partial success applying them at best, I’ve always found them to be rather inspiring. However, your article on getting up early has worked wonders. I’m just starting to get up at 7 am consistently, and it’s working… I guess the trick is, that you don’t psychologically _feel_ you’re getting less sleep, since you go to bed when you’re tired — This is kinda weird, since if I sleep ‘naturally’, I’ll sleep between 10 and 12 hours a night, but now I feel well-rested with less than eight. I’ve also started doing sit-ups for five minutes a day ( hey, if three minutes using a gimmick-machine is enough, five minutes of honest sit-ups should work also )
ANYway, the point is, that despite the fact I’m having some financial troubles now, I’m very optimistic about the future, and in big part due to your articles and writings.