How Not to Be A One-Hit-Wonder
by Adrian Hanft, (3 comments)
One of the most tempting strategies for a website is to make something so cool that the whole internet will link to you. Who hasn’t dreamed of getting a link on BoingBoing and becoming the hottest thing on the internet? Well, last week with the help of BoingBoing, MetaFilter, Engadget and Digg, my Lego camera infected the internet like some kind of virus. I would be lying to you if I said that the attention that my Lego camera received wasn’t awesome. When it comes to generating a buzz, the sites I listed are pretty much the best place to have a link. So as I reflect on my dream tour of the internet, I am forced to ponder this dreadful question: Does viral publicity equal success, or does it make me I a one-hit-wonder? I guess time will tell, but let me share the details of the past week with you and attempt to convince you that a website full of good content is better than viral success any day of the week.
October 1
I drop a teaser in Be Aware 6 about my Lego camera. I get a couple nice comments and that is about it.
October 2
I quietly post the Lego camera instructions on my photo blog (FoundPhotography.com) to little fanfare.
October 8
I get my first roll of film back and gain the reassurance that the camera does actually work. I make a post to the toy camera group and a Lego group on Flickr. I get a pretty good response from the groups.
October 9
Presumably tipped off by members of the Flickr groups Digg, BoingBoing and MetaFilter post about my camera at about the same time. The tidal wave begins.
October 10
October 12
A little late to the show, but worth mentioning, I get “clicked” by MSNBC.
October 16
As of today, 93 blogs have made posts that reference the Lego camera (according to Technorati). This more than anything will probably be the biggest help to me because it will increase my pagerank, and bump me up in search results.
The question you are all asking is, “How much traffic did that generate?” Well, before the hype, FoundPhotography.com generated 500 visitors on a good day. On October 9th the site’s traffic peaked at 29,000 visitors. For the visual people out there, it looked like this:
Of the 85,671 visitors I have received so far this month, here is how the traffic broke down:
Digg: 18% (15,400 visitors)
BoingBoing: 10% (8,500 visitors)
Engadget: 7% (6,000 visitors)
MetaFilter: 6.5% (5,500 visitors)
The important part of the graph to notice isn’t the peak, but rather the sharp drop off. Massive viral traffic is meaningless if it doesn’t generate repeat visitors. My hope is that a small fraction of the traffic from the last week returns to my site. While viral traffic is great, it was never my main goal. That is wy I feel relatively confident that some of the visitors will return. I never set out to be a one-hit-wonder. Instead, I am building FoundPhotography to be a site worth coming back for. The same is true of Be A Design Group. Every post we write has the goal of getting the reader to return. That is where the real value is. A regular reader is worth much more than 30,000 visitors that never come back. That is why Be A Design Group’s monthly traffic will still greatly exceed that generated by the buzz machines.
Let my experience leave you with this final bit of advice: Focus your effort towards developing consistent quality content, and if in the process you hit the viral jackpot, all the better.
Comments (3)
Neil said:
After finding out about your lego camera (through flickr or boingboing, I forget which) and visiting your site I then subscribed to your rss feed. So I haven’t been visiting the site per se but keeping track of new postings with bloglines.
Is there any way you can factor in people who’ve taken that route? I’m stilling following your site even though I may not count as a unique visitor.
Posted on October 30, 2005
Donna said:
It’s well deserved. Your archives were great too!
Posted on October 31, 2005
Adrian said:
Thanks, Donna!
Neil, that is a good question. My RSS indexes show up in my popular pages statistics, so yes I can track them somewhat. I am not really sure if that gets tracked as a unique visit, though. If someone knows for sure, please let me know. I haven’t been able to find an answer online anywhere.
Posted on October 31, 2005