Must have been a boring night last night

Posted on | October 4, 2007 | 5 Comments

Not sure what was happening in the world last night, but looks like most of you were logging in here to read the old Catpaw rant. I was taken by surprise by the sheer volume of hits I received in a short period of time. From midnight until about 7pm yesterday I had 0 visitors.

That’s right – the big  goose egg. I’ve been receiving between 10 to 17 hits a day – respectable, but greedy me wanted more. I have to admit I was a bit disappointed yesterday to see no visitors so at 7pm I tried something new. I logged onto my Stumble account and stumbled my own site to see if it would bring anyone in.

Well… spank my back side and colour me shocked! At 8:30pm I couldn’t log onto my own site for about 5 minutes because it was so busy. Stumble wasn’t the only place to bring in this bumper crop of visitors, but it sure brought in the bulk of them. By midnight I had 85 visits.  That’s right – 85 individual hits in 5 hours. Considering 20 hits in a 24 hour period was a great day, this was spectacular!

Now I have to figure out how to keep the new viewers as permanent readers. Its fine to have people log on to see the site, but if they are only going to stay a couple of seconds and never return, then its hardly worth the traffic. On the upside, a percentage of people actually hung around and read a couple of posts. If they come back, then my readership will increase substantially. If, out of 85 people, 7 – 10 become readers, then my readership will see a healthy increase over an extended period of time.

So far today I’ve had approximately 14 visits. Pretty respectable. I’m going to watch things to see if this was a blimp on the radar or if Stumble permanently increases my traffic. I’ll keep you posted. 8 out of the 14 visitors today have stayed to read a post (as compared to logging in and passing through in about 0 seconds). That’s a good average but I think it will be lower as the evening sets in.

Last night’s  map, captured at about midnight looks like the world caught a bad case of the measles. I’ll do another capture tonight and load it as a comparison point to yesterday’s.

Map of hits on Oct. 4 2007

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Category: Blog Advertising, Blogging, Increasing Blog Traffic

Comments

5 Responses to “Must have been a boring night last night”

  1. Anonymous
    October 5th, 2007 @ 11:48 pm

    Meow…I’m here for you!

  2. catpaw
    October 6th, 2007 @ 9:25 am

    LOL – you made my morning! Thanks for the meow.

  3. Cardinal Wolsey
    October 9th, 2007 @ 4:32 pm

    Catpaw, I normally get similar hits to your blog, so will try the Stumble and see if I get a similar result. As you say, building regular readers is the key, although I have a little goal to get to Google page one for “Cardinal Wolsey” search (I am halfway down page two currently!). Good luck.

  4. catpaw
    October 10th, 2007 @ 11:10 am

    Let me know if you see a difference.

    And a worthy goal that is Cardinal! Page two is pretty damned good, but page one is perfection.

  5. Cardinal Wolsey
    October 10th, 2007 @ 4:42 pm

    Catpaw, I forgot I had already stumbled my site last year – so far one other person has favourited it. However, the good news is that I have scraped on to bottom of Google page one :) )- so visitors up to 29 today so far, about double the usual.