!anaj ,em s'taht

Boosting Your Blog Traffic, pt. 1: A Little Help From Britney

Last week I tried to boost my blog traffic by heeding Lenina’s advice that a bit of sleaze cannot harm anybody (actually, it can) but is good for the traffic. I blogged about Britney Spear’s latest publicity stunt. It was a rather bland post and didn’t even contain images or video (only links to images and videos), but the title was reminiscent of a Britney Spears title and also contained a reference to the last Hasselhof PR disaster. For further enhancement, I used rather salacious tags, such as ‘upskirt’, ‘boobies’, ‘nipples’ and ‘nude’.

Furthermore, I submitted the post to digg.com, which was probably a bit of a cheat because the only reasonable category was Video>People – as mentioned, it only contained links to videos and thus circumvented digg.com’s own recommendation to link directly to news stories and videos.

But boost my blog traffic it did:To this day, the post has only received one digg (which was my own), but it never the less helped to drive the traffic figures: In the past seven days, the post has received 802 hits, because people click on many more stories published on digg than they actually digg. ‘To digg’ a story means to express that one likes it by clicking on a ‘digg it!’ button. The more diggs, the higher the ranking on digg.

And these are my traffic ratings of the past eight days – the Britney Spears post was published on the 6th of May:

03/05/2007 – 75 views
04/05/2007 – 77 views
05/05/2007 – 75 views
06/05/2007 – 339 views
07/05/2007 – 1589 views
08/05/2007 – 295 views
09/05/2007 – 186 views
10/05/2007 – 149 views

Tomorrow, I’ll explain what happened on the seventh of May. It had nothing to do with Britney’s tits at all.