How I got 27 061 views on my blog in two days

Last Monday morning I woke up, got out of bed, and made some coffee. Still half asleep, I stirred some milk and sugar in then plopped myself down in front of the computer. As the monitor awoke from hibernation mode, I noticed that the browser was still up from the night before revealing a half-finished blog post. After debating whether or not to even keep it I half-heartedly hit the “Save Draft” button. Before exiting I noticed the WordPress stats graph looked funny.

Normally it appears kind of like this:

However, that morning it looked more like this:

Curious, I clicked on it to investigate and was met with one hell of a surprise. I refreshed the page and checked the URL to make sure I was still on my blog. Over the weekend I received 8,823 views on Saturday and 18,238 views on Sunday dwarfing the prior stats.

Thanks are owed to the members of both the Reddit and StumbleUpon communities who helped to promote DevosDiscovery.Wordpress.com. It must have been the right time of the day when I posted on Reddit because it continued to rise in popularity until it was ranked 26th in the Technolgy subreddit which has 2,018,364 readers. This was due partially to the fact that many heated arguments started in the comment section over issues like space-based solar power and vertical farms. It was also featured in the Futurology subreddit where it reached a peak of being the 10th most up-voted.

StumbleUpon has always provided a constant stream of visitors to several of my posts. It was extremely active on the weekend caused by the high traffic generated by Reddit and has remained exponentially more helpful since. StumbleUpon is extremely useful for finding random pages on topics you’re interested in and the more popular a page gets the more users it sends. The entry that received all the attention was called 2012 – 2040: Which 5 Technologies Will Shape the Future? and has been re-posted on six separate websites to date.

Facebook and Twitter are usually regarded as the main social media tools to use for reaching a larger audience. I’ve used them both fairly frequently in the past but have received mixed results.

I hope this story of my recent traffic boom will help you using social media as a method to increase readership. Each social media network has its own quirks and advantages based upon what you want to use it for.