At the time I’m writing this, I launched this blog exactly one week ago. Althought I expected to get support from my awesome Twitter followers and readers from my other blogs, I was far from thinking that one of my blog posts were going to be featured on delicious.com frontpage so quickly.
But it happened. Last friday, my latest blog post here at Cats Who Blog, entitled “Top 10 WordPress plugins to monetize your blog“, was published on delicious.com and, as you can guess, it brought a lot of traffic to this all new blog. Here is, in details, what happened, and how it happenned.
All starts with a “good” post
Well, all blog posts can’t be social media success, that’s a sure thing. As many of you have already noticied, the “list” post format is very popular among bloggers, probably due to the fact that this kind of post have a huge chance of performing well in social media sites.This post was a list of ten WordPress plugins dedicated to monetize your blog. It was very in-topic with Cats Who Blog, but it was also related with a subject that is very popular among most of my Twitter followers and readers from my other blogs.
List posts have always been a reader favorite, even if sometimes i’m personally bored to see so much post of this format (And even worst, some listing up to 100 items…). I can’t be objective on my own work and say I wrote a good post, so let’s just say a wrote a “well formatted for success” post.
The Twitter effect
My main promotion tool for my blog posts is Twitter. One year after creating an account there, I have 2600+ followers, mostly interested in web development, web design and blogging. After publishing the blog post on Thursday 15, October, I tweeted the following message:
As you can guess, some of my Twitter followers clicked on the link and went on to read the post. The “retweet” button I inclued in my post helped to get new tweets about it. In my opinion, you should definitely use this button in your blog posts: Just click here to read how I use them.
Another thing that helped the post to gain some popularity is the “Please RT!!!” message I inclued in the original tweet. Why? Probably because some of my followers saw it and RT the post even without reading it, just because I asked and they wanted to be nice.
Another good thing is that most of the people who RT my original tweet kept the “Please RT!!!” sentence in it, which lead to a “viral” RT.
Social media snowball effect
At the same time, I decided to submit my post on the social media site DesignBump. First, the post just get a few clicks and I thought it will not be published on DesignBump front page. So, I decided to ask my followers “hey, can you please bump this“?
It can sound weird, unfair or what you want, but I made it: The post was on the top of DesignBump front page and got a really nice exposure. As more people saw the post on DesignBump, read it and retweeted it, the post got more and more Delicious.com saves. I was lucky enought to have it in the “Fresh bookmarks” of the site. Of course, this brought lots of new readers, and delicious saves. The post then become a popular delicious.com item.
Finally
Due to the delicious.com front page exposure, other sites as such as popurls.com or jimmyr.com, which aggreagate popular content from social bookmarking sites (Digg, delicious, etc) grabbed the post and featured it on their front page.
On Friday 16, Cats Who Blog received a total of 1115 unique visitors and 2109 pageviews, as shown in the stats screenshot below. Not so bad for a blog that only exist since a week!
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Not a bad start for your first week!
Thank you Tom!
Hey Jean, Congratulations. I am following your blog since day one & really happy for its success, BTW what is the statistics program you are using??
@Mushi : Thanks! I use the StatPress WordPress plugin for my stats.
None of the above, its just cool ^^
Nice one Jean
I’ve experienced a similar feeling when you RT-ed my post on domain parking wordpress themes (which you found out about from @themelab as I see). That happened 5 days ago, and I’ve received over 500 unique visitors since… though I didn’t make it to the frontpage of delicious.com
By the way, thanks for that RT
Congratulations! and Wow! this is mind-blowing. But this has nothing to do with luck or stars being aligned, it’s just you publishing excellent content.
Thanks for sharing!
I’m a follower now too.
I believe your success on your other ventures has taught you what works well and what doesn’t work so well. That motivates me to work very hard.
Your brand is exceedingly cool: Cat Who Do Stuff! That rocks!
@Dave Doolin : Thanks!
How about CatsWhoRock.com? You better register it now before it’s gone!
really luv ur content. looking forward for blogging tips…
If only I’d realised it was that easy
@Dave Sparks : It is not always easy, but a sure thing is that if you work hard (And follow my tips
) you’ll get results. Good luck!
quote=”Jean”:
I use the StatPress WordPress plugin for my stats.
@Jean: Thanks, was wondering that myself aswell.
Great plugin !
Pity that most of these tips are only applicable to webdesign/webdev related content. Also, congratulations on such fast success. I was following catswhocode (blog, not Twitter) (yet) quite a while already, but I think I will kind of participate more this time.
@Eugen R : You’re quite right, I use different technics to promote non-web dev/web design content. Great idea for a future post!
This is excellent example of new blog start. Impressive result.
Now that’s a way to start a new blog. So far I’ve been quite sceptical about Twitter and haven’t really got into it. Guess I’ll have to rethink about it if it has such results.
Twitter is the key
That’s a good achievement
And yes, if your post is original and good with a detailed research on the topic then you will surely get good response from it.
But at the same time I would say that if your posts are not getting front page on Delicious or Digg or any other site then you should get disappointed that nobody likes your blog and nobody voting for your content. It all depends on the topic and the type of visitors you get. You just keep working hard on every post
Great article! I did these same techniques as well on the Design Informer and it has done great as well.
Another thing that I have done is to submit my site to the different news feeds of the bigger blogs such as Abduzeedo and Smashing Magazine!
@Design Informer : You’re right, submitting your posts to news feed is a very good promotion technique that I have used before…I should definitely write about it!