How I got two consecutive record breaking blog traffic days

Last week I had two consecutive record breaking days in terms of unique visitor numbers to my blog. And it was no April Fool’s joke!

My best ever traffic day before last week was February 27th 2009 when my 8 things bloggers can learn from Perez Hilton article went a bit viral and sent me 923 unique visitors. That all changed last week.

From 923 to 1324 to 2799 unique daily visitors

Thursday April 2nd saw me break that record as 1324 unique visitors stopped by my blog. And even better, on April 3rd the new record was more than doubled as 2799 unique visitors stopped by.

These are some huge numbers for a blog like mine. If you remember well, this blog went live on October 25th 2008 with 2 unique visitors. 6 months down the line and 2799 visited it…

Reasons for this traffic increase

• One of my posts went popular on Digg

My top 5 Twitter plugins to use on your WordPress blog was submitted to Digg by a prominent user Notyavgkat. Notyavgkat had made some 60+ stories popular on Digg before, so it means that most stories he submits will get some attention. So did my Twitter article. It got some 200+ diggs (also thanks to The_GMan for tweeting about it), was made popular, was included in Digg RSS newsfeed and had a short run on the Digg front page. From the 2nd until April 4th Notyavgkat’s submission brought me 1617 unique visitors from Digg.

• I got a great link from Thesis Theme website

Thesis Theme website occasionally links to useful Thesis resources around the web and late on April 1st they posted a link to my how to magazine style your WordPress blog with Thesis Theme article. My article was in a list of 8 different resources, but for some reason I was listed as number 1 which definitely contributed to me getting a lot of clicks. From 1st until April 4th the link from Thesis site brought me 924 unique visitors.

A look at the top 6 referrers over the 4 days…

Note that my regular marketing activities still work. Twitter sent me 630 visitors in those 4 days, StumbleUpon sent me 200 visitors and Google sent me 604 visitors.

Effect on the most popular posts

My top 10 most popular blog posts plugin in the sidebar changed dramatically. Twitter plugin post went from spot number 5 to number 1 and will probably stay there for some time. Thesis magazine style post entered the top 10 for the first time and is currently on number 7.

Effect on the RSS subscribers

FeedBurner seems to have some problems these days as my RSS feed counter jumps several hundreds subscribers up and down from day to day but today’s counter shows 957 subscribers which is the highest number of subscribers I have ever had.

Be motivated, continue working regularly…

What this shows is that it is important to keep working on your blog. Write new articles, connect with your audience. Once in a while you will get a very good link or someone with authority will find your article useful and will submit it to social media, which has potential to bring you tons of new visitors.