Exploding Traffic

It has now been just over 2 months since I moved this blog from Blogger to TypePad.

There was an immediate increase in traffic to this blog after the move.  Also, I started posting more often (nearly every day).  The net effect was that by before Christmas this blog's traffic reached new record levels.  It tailed off over the holidays, but since the new year it has been increasing again, to the point where page views are now 50% higher in January than they were in December.

A lot of posts are responsible for this increase, although it turns out that the Best Blonde Joke Ever post is now the single highest traffic post in this blog's history.  I suppose that should tell me to post one liners instead of long posts, but I suspect that was an unusual situation.

The decision to repost older posts slowly rather than converting over the archives in some way has turned out to be an excellent decision.  The old posts are generating new traffic and getting read again, which they would not have if I'd just reposted old archives.  I have a few more old posts yet to post.

Gapingvoid recently posted The Two Immutable Laws of Blogging:

The Two Immutable Laws of Blogging:

1. "Nobody's going to read your blog unless there's something in it for them." -Seth Godin.

2. "Nobody's going to link to your blog unless there's something in it for them." -Hugh MacLeod

There is no question these laws hold.

One of the ways that the switch from Blogger to TypePad has helped this blog is that I can now do trackbacks.  Trackbacks allow you to get a link whenever you link to someone's post.  This brings in traffic from the post you have quoted.   Bloggers who don't use trackbacks (either because their platform doesn't support them, or because they disable them) are missing out.  Trackbacks work better than putting comments on other blogs.  Trackbacks are the great democratic voting machine for blogs.

Also, this blog has been getting some notice outside the shareware/independent game area, such as in this Springfield IL blog post.

The cat pictures on Friday are always among the highest traffic posts every week, as it brings in yet another demographic.

At the same time I converted this blog to TypePad, I created my new stock trading blog.  As much as the traffic to this blog has been exploding, the traffic to Solitaire Trader has been exploding more. Traffic at Solitaire Trader is already as high as the traffic here was 2 months ago, and it is only 2 months old instead of 2 years old.  It seems highly likely that Solitaire Trader traffic will exceed A Shareware Life traffic in just a few more months.

I have done nothing to promote Solitaire Trader in the stock market blog community, but yet it was found and it is starting to get links on some of the major other stock market blogs.  There is no doubt that it has high traffic potential as stock market blogs are getting more and more popular.

The main thing I need to do with this blog is make sure that I keep posting regularly - post often, try to keep the posts interesting, and link to other blogs.

Comments

[GBGames]

I have a question: why encourage so much traffic to your blogs? Do you have a goal of influencing the community/industry more? I don't know if I missed out on a post or about page that explained it already, but I was just wondering if you have a bigger reason for getting more traffic.