Don't click, it just encourages him

So last night I did what I do at the end of every month, and went a little self-promotion crazy, this time with a view to making my monthly traffic for January double that from December. Thankfully I was pretty close already and only needed a handful of views and referrals to do it.

I hit target with 12 minutes to spare, but with all that promotion things naturally kept rolling on until midnight and beyond, and picking up a strong handful of views as I went to bed, and a further few dozen between then and lunch today.

There's a certain interest and sense to these flurries of promotion. Due to my last two articles (on percentages and self-confidence) being released so close together, yesterday was responsible for an entire 6th of January's traffic. That's 16.6%. What's great and exciting though, is that the half-life of some of that promotion will last days, even months, and keep a steady background of readers coming in.


In the world of social media it's interesting that Facebook has many places to post links back to yourself, while most would say Twitter has only one. Twitter provides a feverish flurry of traffic for each link, that's for sure, but the permanence of listings on Facebook create a constant stream of readers over time.

Beyond that they have even more seperate benefits. Facebook users are more likely to remember the place of a link, perhaps returning to it to share it or read again, while users of Twitter and other fast networks produce more favourites/fans/follows, more people scared that if they drop the link it'll be lost in the rolling tide of news and nonsense, so should be stored somewhere. I for one know my bookmarks folder at work is stuffed with those things I don't feasibly have enough time to read without feeling like I'm shirking off.

So I'm now staring at a terrifyingly low Day-One traffic measure, faced with a terrifyingly short month to raise it, and constantly repeating to myself the virtues of quality over quantity.

It's fun!

Nick
xx