A post on Awesomeology hit the front page of Digg a few days ago (thank you to whoever submitted it!) and we had a crazy spike in traffic.

Awesomeology has now been around for about 6 months, and in that time we’ve had a total of 527,746 visitors look at a total of 845,793 pages!

Take a look at the stats…

What’s Up With The Traffic?

As you can see, it started off pretty well and then in November some of my posts started becoming popular with Digg and StumbleUpon. As you can see, though, there was a big dropoff in traffic in January. That’s when I switched Awesomeology from a self-hosted WordPress site to be hosted at WordPress.com.

Unfortunately, when I did that I was forced to change my permalinks around, so all of the traffic that I had been getting resulted in 404 errors and my traffic almost completely dried up.

The reason I made the switch was because I was getting way too much traffic and I don’t make any money from this site. Hosting was getting to be too expensive.

But you know what? I didn’t care that most of my traffic went away. I really enjoyed publishing Awesomeology. I usually posted 1-3 posts per day (usually funny videos), and it didn’t take all that much time.

As you can see from the chart…I’ve just been plugging along with hardly any traffic for the last few months, when all of a sudden it’s getting picked up by StumbleUpon and Digg again.

The #1 Benefit To Having A High Traffic Site

Even if you don’t make much money from it, for me the best thing is that it can drive FREE traffic to other projects that DO make money.

For example, on the day last week that I had the huge spike in Digg traffic, I was able to drive 7,209 visitors to The Coolest Gifts by just putting an advertisement after the Awesomeology post. Clearly, the people who clicked through liked what they saw, because they looked at a total of 19,935 pages. I made quite a few affiliate sales that day, and probably dropped a whole bunch of 45 and 60-day cookies, which means that additional commissions may still be coming.

Again, I got 7,209 visitors in one day (up from 155 the day before!) and I didn’t spend a single dollar to generate them.

That’s the power of a high traffic site.

Go Start A Free Site On Something You Love

I love finding entertaining videos, pictures, stories, etc and telling other people about them. I could do it every day for the rest of my life, and that’s what Awesomeology is. It doesn’t matter if I make money from it, I’ll still do it. I actually have LOST money from Awesomeology over the last 6 months (before switching to the free host).

If there’s something that you love (and I’m sure that there is for everybody), go start a blog about it. Get a free one on wordpress.com. Post something (or a few things) every single day. Don’t even try to make money from it. Keep it up for at least a year. I think you’ll be very surprised at the results.

Tags: awesomeology, the coolest gifts

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 9:54 am and is filed under Real Life Examples. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.