I was reading one of Seth Godin’s posts, and I looked at the number of times people shared his post on social networks. The numbers for the post I was looking at and all of the others are impressive. I also knew his statistics are up on Quantcast.
If you type in the URL for Seth’s Blog into Quantcast, you will see how many visitors he gets in a day. Most of the time, he is getting over 10,000 visitors every day, but I decided to look deeper into the statistics. There were some moments when Seth’s traffic skyrocketed. I took a look.
I identified the days when he went from a constant rate of 10,000 visitors a day (or something like that) to over 30,000 visitors on a single day. That traffic stayed on his blog for a few days which meant more subscribers and more sales. I looked at three days in particular.
On the first day I saw Seth’s traffic spike up was when he was giving away a free book to download. The book included advice from many well-known entrepreneurs. The book was over 70 pages long, and at the end of his book, Seth advised his readers to share it.
What happened? According to Seth’s blog post, the book was trending on Twitter for 7 hours, and there were 20 tweets a minute about the book. That’s almost 10,000 tweets about a single book. The place to get Seth’s free book was on his blog.
Seth’s book was also about getting your goals done in the New Year, and since he started giving away the book in December, a lot of people wanted to know how to keep their New Year goals alive.
Another time when Seth’s traffic spiked was when he shared a fascinating picture. There were 3 blocks that compared the death rates per watts produced involving nuclear energy, oil, and coal. The death rate for nuclear energy was by far the lowest. Coal was the highest. It was a stunning picture, and the post was able to sum up the picture nicely.
If we guessed, we all would have thought nuclear energy would have caused the most deaths. The answer ended up being coal. I had to look at the picture twice to see the tiny square for nuclear energy. No one expected it, and that created a lot of buzz.
The other post that got a lot of traffic was an April Fool’s joke about the Kindle Zero which was a free Kindle. By the way, you could also make money with the Kindle Zero by reading challenging books. A lot of blogs featured this post from Seth Godin among the other April Fool’s tricks.
So those were three posts that resulted in a skyrocket of traffic for Seth Godin. There is something we can all take away from this knowledge: be clever, stunning, and give stuff away for free.
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