Armchair Theorist

Here is what the Google Analytics for my humble blog - Armchair Theorist - looks like from early July until today:

What really stands out is the three spikes in traffic I received in the past three months. Let’s take a deeper look, shall we…

The Mini Spike (Left Side)

On July 12, I attended the E27 Unconference event, and promptly blogged about it on July 14. This brought in 83 unique visiters for me the next day, a then record-high. This blog post was also my most commented post ever, with 23 comments. Of course, a bunch of those comments were from me responding to people, but who’s counting anyways.

Anyway, for that post, I linked to all of the other blog entries I could find which talked about the event, and pretty much everyone reciprocated with a back link as well. Thanks to this post, I was able to interact with a few bloggers online for the first time, including the always interesting Claudia.

This post also got me a then-high 18 “pongs” on Singapore blog aggregator Ping.sg.

The “M” Spike (Middle)

On September 2, the Google Chrome comic was leaked, and I promptly blogged about the impending release of the Google Chrome web browser. Again, I linked to all of the existing blog coverage of Chrome I could find, including the official Google blog.

This brought in a new record-high 136 unique visitors the next day, mostly thanks to search engine queries for “Google Chrome” as well as traffic from the Google blog.

After a day or two of downtime, I blogged again about Chrome, but this time on my experiences using Chrome once I had a chance to download it and play around with it for a bit. Again, I linked to the official Google blog, and I was able to top my previous record by registering 138 unique visiters on September 5.

The Ping.sg community was less than thrilled though, with neither blog post registering more than 4 “pongs”.

The Big A%$ Spike (Right Side)

I attended a party during F1 weekend, and promptly blogged about it. In my opinion, this was a pretty crappy post, with not much content in it. But it did have a few photos of scantily-dressed lingerie models who were at the party. I also diligently labeled my post as “NSFW“.

The result was a new record-high 283 unique visitors to my blog on September 29, and over 500 visits over the next five day period.

The Ping.sg community particularly liked the post, giving me a ridiculous 43 “pongs”  and placing me at the pole position of the daily leader board for the first (and likely last) time.

However, only one guy left a comment.

My Key Takeaways

1. If you want people to read your blog, always blog about something topical- i.e. posts that have to be read right now. You don’t necessarily have to break the news, but ride on the second wave of readers by offering a deeper analysis beyond what is superficially covered by the first wave of “news breakers”.
2. Link to as much of the first wave coverage as possible, without making your blog entry look like an annoying link blog. Try to link to the central news source (e.g. official Google blog for Google Chrome) if possible, especially if they are high-volume blogs.
3. Events are usually topical and good to blog about, since people will either a) miss the event and want to read about it, or b) attended the event and want to see if their mugshot appears on any blogger’s photos.
4. When all else fails and you still can’t get readership, blog about girls, parties, upskirts, celebrities, and sex. And don’t forget to label your post as “NSFW”.

See Also:

• 5 Observations on Google Chrome
• Ain’t Gonna Give up Firefox for Google Chrome
• Takeaways from Singapore Digital Media Festival 2008