Those are the kind of things that destroy social networks and communities in general. Alright, maybe the word “destroy” is a bit too harsh, but it makes me mad when I think of it. Today I am going to talk about traffic spikes and how to get them. I will try and teach you some of my methods and I hope you will benefit from my words.

My first traffic spike, ever!

It happened 5 days before Christmas 2009. and I was very excited about it. I woke up one morning and noticed the bandwidth usage on my server has gone from the average 10-50 MB per day to a few GB. First I thought I’ve been hit with some kind of virus, like the Black Plague or something. After checking my AwStats and Google Analyitics (like 5-6 times) I realized that I’ve been spiked! Thankfully, the server didn’t overload, lag out or anything like that.

It is important that I stress the satisfaction of this because you can draw motivation from my excitement. I know I did the same thing when I read about people freaking out about their traffic spikes on YouTube videos or single posts – posts that hit the front page of Digg or Reddit.

The “bad” news

I guess you can call it bad news because the traffic spike didn’t exactly happen on this blog but on another blog that I am admin of. Some of you might already know it as a Knowledge Reactor project, it’s called Cosmo’s Reviews and it is all about fresh news and new computer game reviews from the industry. Cosmo is the mastermind behind the content but things like blog infrastructure, marketing and promotions are my responsibility.

Which social network website was responsible?

It was StumbleUpon! There are a lot of people that think SU is useless because it is just so random. What I think is that there is a lot greater chance that someone will randomly stumble and thumb-up your article on SU than vote it up on Reddit or Digg unless directly linked. StumbleUpon is a great service you should definitely be using, especially if you are a newie blogger. With StumbleUpon, you would want to use their URL shortener called Su.pr which will display a SU bar on tool top of your article, making it easy to vote it up.

Important note: There is a rule on StumbleUpon where a user is not supposed to submit his own articles, only articles of others. I’m not sure how often they check that and ban people because of it but play it safe – find a StumbleBuddy!

What did I do?

Cosmo wrote the article and I submitted it to StumbleUpon. The interesting thing is, the article was submitted over a month before it spiked and received very little popularity until then. There is absolutely nothing special I did, just clicked the submit button and the content did the rest.

Contrary to what some people think, spamming social networks with your own content submissions is not the way to go. What is more important is, friendships, connections and communities. When you connect with people, they will help you out and Tweet your new blog post, submit your article to Reddit or Digg, submit it to StumbleUpon. When you have friends who care, you are free to spend less time on marketing and more time on writing amazing content!

Time for some tables and graphs

Another thing that might motivate you to write good content and do it the right way, like I’d like to believe I am doing is showing you some raw success stats – so here we go:

Google Analytics stats for Cosmo's Reviews from 13th Dec to 30 Dec

On this image you can see that before the spike, the average visitors per day was around 10 since the blog was only about a 2 months old and a new article hasn’t been posted for a week. On the 19th it started to spike up to 1,280 visitors and then up to 2,960 visitors on the 20th. After that huge peak it started to descend although what I found very interesting is that the number didn’t go back to an average of 10 but kept steady at 100 to 150 visits per day. Sometimes it even went up to 250, mostly when a new post was published.

Before I thought that spikes where pretty much useless because a lot of people that come to your site on a spike-day just “bounce” off it – don’t spend more than 10 seconds on your blog or website. I’ve always learned that a less related traffic is always better than more random traffic. Be as it may, some of the people stayed interested and started returning to the blog which was great.

Let’s see the traffic sources table next:

Google Analytics traffic sources table for Cosmo's Reviews

An absolutely huuuuge amount of visits from StumbleUpon – this screenshot was taken today. From looking at this table, I can safetly say that the spike was not just a spike but turned into a constant funnel of new traffic. The traffic spike from SU was only about 4,000 visits and it was 20 days ago. So I got more traffic from StumbleUpon for the next 20 after the spike than for the last 2 months of the blogs existence. I consider that as huge and I am happy about it even if I’m just the handy-man behind the scenes

The post that went viral on StumbleUpon currently has about 7,500 views from SU alone and it’s rising every day, still bringing in readers.

StumbleUpon Twitter hashtags

Next to the obvious #SU and #StumbleUpon Twitter has tags, there is also one I’d like to mention, promote and encourage my readers and their friends to use. The tag is called #USIS which stands for “You Stumble I Stumble”.

What does that hashtag actually mean? Well, when you tweet your new blog post title and link alongside this tag, other people using and monitoring it will see your tweet even if they are not following you. After they see it, they will click on your link (maybe) and submit your article to StumbleUpon. It is basically a small twitter hash-community of people who Stumble each others content since self-Stumbling can get you “banned”.

I am not the one that original thought it up, I’ve read it on a blog but I forgot which one (turns out it was http://www.sitesketch101.com/ ) - seems like a great idea and I’ve been using for about 2 months now. It has gone a bit inactive recently and that’s why I’m pointing you to it.

If you are still new to Twitter hashtags and don’t see the point in using them, or just don’t know how – check out my older post about Twitter hashtags!

Conclusion

Every topic that you write on your blog and which gets submitted to StumbleUpon has a good chance to go viral so be patient, write quality, don’t spam and you’ll strike your home run. I hope this article has helped point people to the right direction when it comes to promoting yourself on social networks. If you where doing the exact same thing as me for a longer period and you’ve not gotten any results so far, I hope this article has motivated you to work harder and be patient.

Hope you all have a nice week and don’t forget to share this post with your friends (and khm Stumble it khm ). Also, feel free to be my friend (aka subscriber) on StumbleUpon HERE.

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