September was a break out month for John Chow dot Com. Thanks to the seemingly impossible task of pulling off six Diggs in one week, I managed to expose the blog to a very large number of new users. And I’m glad to say that quite a few has decided to bookmarked the blog, subscribe to the RSS or become daily visitors.
It is very hard to see with the above traffic graph, but before the Diggs, the blog was growing steadily in traffic every month. I did 12,000 page views in August and was on target to hit 30,000 page views in September. Then Stephen decided it would be a cool idea to submit my Lexus LS460 post to Digg. Five other Diggs later, my blog made the number six spot in the Alexa “Movers & Shakers†list.
I am not sure what my new traffic level will be because I am still feeling the after effects of all the backlinks generated by the six Diggs. At the start of September, I had a less than 1000 pages linking to me. A check of Google now shows the blog with over 28,000 backlinks. This has done wonders for my Google search ranking. I have concluded that Digg can be a very useful tool for launching a new blog. If you were to use a PPC ads to bring you the 140,000 visitors I got from the six Diggs, it would cost you $35,000 (assuming 25 cents per click). I may do a future blog post on that art of Digging.
The trick now is to retain the new visitors. It is going to be impossible to keep everyone who visited but I am hoping the new visitors got a chance to explore the blog a bit and like what they read. It may have been Digg that got them here, but it is going to be my content that makes them stay.
I want to thank everyone who has sent me an email in the past week. Wow! The positive response to my blog has been overwhelming. If you haven’t heard back from me yet, please be patient as I am still going through the backlog.