Friday, June 18, 2004

When does a blog tip?

It's an interesting question.  Since I started my blog and started keeping track of visitors, I've generally had between 15 and 20 visitors a day (read my post about not being able to track persons reading my blog via RSS or ATOM feeds).   Suddenly it seems like I am getting between 70-120 visitors per day.

Why might I be getting this infusion of visitors?  Well, here are a few thoughts:

  • I've run a couple of promotions giving away GMail invitations in order to drive traffic to the blog.
  • Other blogs seem to be linking to my stories.  That wasn't happening in the first few months, but seems to be happening more now.  Perhaps the quality of my product is getting better; or I've broken in as a good content provider; or I've being blogging long enough that it doesn't seem like I'm going to abandon my blog.  I'm not entirely sure what the real reason is.
  • I've spent a lot of time managing links, both inbound and outbound.
  • I spend the time to Trackback to blogs that support the functionality, especially blogs that I know are well-trafficked.

I look at a lot of popular business blogs that sometimes mention their visitors per day and am astounded that they run into the thousands; I'm just happy to have broken into the hundreds.  It does make my question what it takes to make a blog tip from sort of nichey and lightly read to mainstream with thousand of visitors.  Obviously I've gotten more traffic, but I don't feel like I've yet tipped; of course there are so many people reading blogs through syndication (RSS and ATOM), that I may have thousands of readers per day and not even know it (wouldn't that be nice).

I'd be interested to hear from some of you that have blogs that receive thousands of visitors a day on your experiences from starting out to when you tipped into mainstream.

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