Marketing Ninja

One day when I was perusing Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger I came across a post titled How to Surf Blog Traffic Tsunamis; in the post Darren describes the experience of striking gold in social media outlets and other high-traffic blogs:

This morning I wake up to find that it’s one of the most popular posts on delicious, digg and has been linked to from lifehacker and gizmodo (among others). An hour ago it had 7000 visitors (peak) and now as the US heads towards sleep its tracking at around half of that per hour (and still rising on delicious and digg).

This is every bloggers dream: to get noticed and publicized by some gigantic traffic source.

Darren went onto describe the various techniques he employed to help capture that traffic wave and convert some of the visitors into regular readers. I read Darren’s post and daydreamed about how great it would be to have a traffic wave to surf. I didn’t have to wait long.

Two weeks ago, on Saturday September 8th, my article on 10+ Awesome Firefox Extensions for Developers and Bloggers was run on the front page of Lifehacker, one of the highest trafficked blogs worldwide.

I’m going to be writing a multi-part series on surfing traffic waves, but in this article I want to describe the impact that the traffic wave had and has had on AjaxNinja since it occurred.

Before we go any further, let me expressly define what a traffic wave or tsunami is:

A traffic wave or tsunami is an abnormally large surge in traffic occurring as a result of instant publicity; such waves can occur as the result of large-scale exposure in the mainstream media, link placement on the front of much higher trafficked websites, or high temporal placement on social media outlets.

Without any anaylsis from yours truly, here’s AjaxNinja’s traffic graph for the month of August. At which point did Lifehacker run my article on their front page?

AjaxNinja’s Traffic Curve for the Month of August

If you guessed something along the lines of “at the start of the gigantic spike” then you’re correct. Let me throw a couple of figures at you to demonstrate the scale of the traffic surge:

Average Visits/Day before traffic wave: 167*

This period covers from August 7th until September 7th, and the only reason that number is above 100 visits/day is because my Rea Maor response article got picked up by Bink.nu and my Firefox article got a burst of traffic from DZone.

Average Visits/Day during traffic wave: 4540.5

This period covers from September 8th until September 12th. I picked up a ton of traffic on September 13th as a result of a StumbleUpon surge to my 7 Reasons Why Niche Social Media Outlets are Better Than Digg article, which is totally unrelated to the Lifehacker article’s initial traffic wave.

Percent Change: 2718.86% increase in traffic.

When you get into the neighborhood of a 3000% increase in traffic over the span of a few days, that absolutely constitutes a traffic wave. I know the 20,000 visits I received over that span may not impress bloggers with large audiences, but for young blogs like AjaxNinja, that’s a HUGE opportunity.

What you can expect from the traffic surfing series:

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks collecting data and performing research to study the impact the traffic wave has had on AjaxNinja. As you can tell from the graph, the stabilized traffic level (that is, the post-wave traffic level) is drastically higher than what it was prior to the Lifehacker article, approximately 7-8 times greater than what my traffic was before. The effects on my RSS subscribership reflect even more interesting trends.

Here are the articles that I will roll out over the coming days:

• The Chain Reaction of Traffic Waves – How secondary and tertiary waves of traffic result from an initial traffic wave
• Traffic Wave Trends – Simple statistical breakdown of RSS/Visitor trends
• How to Surf Traffic Waves – How to maneuver your blog to capture readers during a surge

The one thing I will absolutely not write about is how I got noticed by Lifehacker, because I honestly have no idea. The Firefox extension article was a back-burner article I had saved for a rainy day and it took me all of 15 minutes to write. It wasn’t even on AjaxNinja’s front page when Lifehacker picked it up.

Attracting a traffic wave is simply a matter of producing content that a large audience can relate to, has a catchy headline, and a matter of promoting that content in a variety of places where a big fish might find it. There’s no magic behind it.

If you have any suggestions for things you’d like to see appear in the articles, please let me know, as I have yet to write them; I just have the data thus far.

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