So How Did I Double My Subscribers in a Week?
At the end of October, this blog was at 259 subscribers, within a week it was well over 500 and remains around the 550 mark now. People keep asking me how it happened so I thought I’d better share. A lot of it was pure good fortune all in a very short space of time…
The Stats Post
This is quite inexplicable. I published my stats post on November 1st saying that I had made no money at all and that I had just missed out on my goal of hitting 275 subscribers. That day, the subscribers grew to 292, and I really have no idea why!
The Blog Commenting Thing
The next day I was shocked to find this post about my blog commenting on Yaro Starak’s blog. Since then, I have received 335 further visitors from Yaro. This brought subscribers up to 308.
The day after that, I was contacted by Steven Aitchison who had heard about me from Yaro’s plug and he wanted to interview me. This interview went up that same day and since then has brought me 149 additional visitors.
Strangely the subscribers dramatically dropped this day back down to 239 but I later realise that Google had broken feedburner. So I don’t know what the real subscriber count was for that day.
Notice that Steven submitted the post to Digg and it got 60 Diggs. Checking my stats, looks like 38 of those who Dugg the post came through to the blog and visited.
The day after that, (up to the 4th November now) I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me when Darren of ProBlogger gave me a plug about exactly the same topic as Yaro had – the blog commenting thing! This boosted my subscribers to 366 and since then, Darren has sent a further 520 visitors my way.
With all the publicity around the blog commenting I figured it would be a perfect time to publish a post I had been working on for around a week – my blog commenting strategy post. That post had received over 1300 page views and over 100 comments.
I believe that people were interested in it because many of the new subscribers that I had just gained arrived here through Yaro & Darren’s post about my commenting so obviously my strategy was of interest to them.
The Twitter Guide
I posted the Twitter guide to the blog in the week that crossed from October into November. On the Monday after it was complete (the 5th), I began my marketing campaign for the guide.
Now this was no accident. I had spent six weeks prior to the campaign, collecting details of any blog that had favourably blogged about Twitter in that time. There were around 120 blogs on my list. I simply emailed them and told them about the guide.
Because Twitter is a productivity tool, it had a much wider reach than Internet marketing circles. In fact, most of the IM world dismisses Twitter as just a silly toy. So, I wanted to put a marketing spin on it in order to make it relevant to my blog but at the same time, make the guide as comprehensive and wide reaching as possible so that I could promote outside of this niche.
The Lifehacker Effect
I went to all the big blogs – Lifehacker, Lifehack, Mashable and 43 Folders. Only Lifehacker responded but what a response! This one little post has brought me over 3,500 visitors! The subscribers jumped to 519 on the first day and then 659 the day after and then it started to drop off.
I suspect that many Lifehacker readers subscribed to the blog thinking it was a productivity blog and later unsubscribed when they realised that it wasn’t.
However, I continued on with my campaign. Over the next 4 days I emailed all of the bloggers on my list and a ton of them blogged about it bringing me a truckload of backlinks and an unknown number of visitors. This is how the RSS count looks:
The Delicious Effect
The guide itself is a series of blog posts but I housed the whole guide on an easily bookmarkable static page which is free of clutter. Because so many people saw it in such a short space of time thanks to Lifehacker, it also made it on the Delicious popular page and that has brought me over 1300 visitors.
The domino effect continues though – Delicious popular posts get featured on other similar sites such as popurls which has brought me 387 visitors. On top of that I have seen a load of backlinks come in titled “this week’s delicious link”, or similar.
The Twitter Effect
Lets not forget the viral power of Twitter itself. Many people didn’t just blog about it, they Twittered about the Guide! Now this should be proof to you all of the viral nature of Twitter – 1500 visitors to this blog in 11 days just from Twitter! If you don’t tweet, start now!
Oh and of course, another benefit from a guide like that which cannot necessarily be replicated (unless you do a guide on one of the other Social media sites) is that I promoted the heck out of my own Twitter Profile and encouraged people to follow me. My followers have ballooned from around 150 to 366 at the time of writing this. I tweet my blog posts amongst other stuff…
Other Miscellaneous Publicity
Rosalind Gardner saw Darren’s post and decided to highlight my failures (to make money) to the world with this post that I spoke about yesterday. That post is still the top one on her blog and has sent me 472 visitors!
Jennifer Laycock of the Search Engine Guide promoted both the Twitter Guide AND my blog commenting strategy posts! She has sent me 357 visitors.
Many of these posts that other people were making got featured on Sphinn and that has sent me 278 visitors. And of course there are loads of other sources that have brought in smaller amounts that have added up to a huge traffic flow.
All in all, I have had over 22,000 visitors in 11 days:
What Can You Do To Replicate This?
That is probably the burning question that is on everybody’s mind. Well as far as the blog commenting thing goes – I don’t know. I was just lucky. Those people are not going to blog about me every month, it’s a one-off effect and I don’t think there is any formula to replicate it.
However, the Twitter Guide does indeed give a few lessons learned. Analysing what I did, I would offer the following advice to anybody who wanted to try something similar.
1) Write About Something That Has Wide Appeal
Twitter can be used by anybody, and in my guide I show how it can be beneficial to anybody who has anything to market. Also, as it’s in the productivity niche, I had the opportunity to promote it in places that were previously out of my reach. Yet it still remains relevant to my blog.
2) Make it Good
I didn’t slap that guide up in 5 minutes, or 5 hours even. I didn’t track the exact time spent but I would estimate that it was around 20 hours work at least. I did my research – I tried to cover all the angles, get the best tools, really emphasise the benefits and so on.
3) Keep it Interesting
The first post of the guide is pretty boring so once it was finished, I went back and edited the first paragraph to really plug the viral effect to make it more of a teaser. I mixed up the posts so some were mainly textual information, and others were fairly short lists. I added plenty of eye candy too.
I didn’t go overboard with the clients & tools etc. There’s a lot more I could have mentioned but in my opinion it would have become overwhelming. I wanted the guide to be genuinely useful so I put just enough stuff in there to allow any user to get the most out of it.
4) Plan Your Marketing Campaign
I started thinking about doing a Twitter guide back in August when I still had my day job. I put up a Google alert for Twitter and have since read every news item and every blog post written about Twitter in the last 6 weeks. As I mentioned previously, anyone who spoke about Twitter in a good light (I skipped the ranters), were noted down.
Conclusion
It really is bizarre that both Yaro & Darren blogged about me within two days of each other. This brought my name into public view and kicked off a whole load of spin off posts on various blogs. I could not have predicted that and I really don’t think it can be repeated, at least not in a deliberate way.
I’d like to thank everybody that has talked about me, linked to me, voted for stories about me, subscribed to the RSS feed, commented here and so on. Do you notice the theme? All of this was done by other people. You can’t blog in a bubble and expect traffic – you must get your name out there into your niche!
So I hope that clears up the mystery and has been enlightening!
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Melissa Chang
November 13, 2007
Caroline,
This has definitely been enlightening! I appreciate your posts and their how-to flavor – they are very helpful as I am timidly stepping out into the commenting world myself. I appreciate the inspiration. – Melissa