Floodgates

Last Saturday, the floodgates opened for traffic to my blog. This screencap shows Saturday’s hourly numbers – the jump from normal to holymotherofgod!

While I had already been getting perhaps 50-75 hits a day for the last week from The Kristen Archives, a site containing a monstrous compendium of erotica in all 687 flavors, I wasn’t prepared for what would happen when my site name got featured for a week. Because I have a link to the site over there in my side bar, my blog name was on the site’s referral section at the bottom of the main page (I think it happens automatically as soon as their referral-grabber-bot finds the link). I was pretty close to the bottom of the list even, but still got nice traffic. So on Saturday when my numbers flew through the roof, I kept checking the site wondering what the hell happened. A few of  my friends looked, I checked the site with all 3 browsers that I have, and still nothing showed as being different. Until Sunday when it was then pointed out to me that my blog name was featured up at the top of the site.Why it took us 24 hours to see that, I’m not really sure. I’m confused, honestly. If I thought Saturday was ridiculous, Sunday was even moreso.

These hourly numbers? That’s what I get on a really good day. A whole day! A few people asked me on Twitter either Saturday or Sunday what the hell was up with my blog because it seemed that every 3rd referral to them in their stat counters was from me. Awesome! For those that have stat counters, what was your traffic boost, I’m curious? I know that watching the exit links showed a whole ton of activity going on from out-clicks of either commenters or those in my blogroll.

I find this all funny for numerous reasons, one of which was that this flood made the one from indienudes.com last November seem small. And I freaked out over that, asked them to move my link from the front page because I was afraid my bandwidth couldn’t handle it or that the numbers would increase my monthly page view numbers to be over the limit for SiteMeter. See, I pay for the premium SiteMeter tracker just because I get a kick out of the statistical things. The price you pay is based on your monthly traffic…..or so I thought. Because back in November I did go over that bottom tier pricing, which is what I pay. In fact I’ve now gone over that number consistenly in the last 4 months but they’ve never billed me anything more. It wouldn’t be a huge increase obviously, but back in November I worried, lol.

The traffic wasn’t all one-hit-wonders either, a very good percentage poked around for a few pages or 20. I’m not sure of course how many might ever come back. So if you’re still reading and you got here from The Kristen Archives, please comment and say hello :)

Now my numbers are going back down to normal-ish and I can go back to being able to see a weeks worth of stats in my log rather than 1 day, hehe. Fellow bloggers, if you could use a little daily boost in traffic, I suggest you add a link to Kristen in your blogroll.