My Day in the Blog Traffic Fast Lane

Wednesday morning I was sitting in a Starbucks in Virginia Beach with about 45 minutes to kill before a 10:00 am meeting. Shortly before heading out, I checked the the stats page on my blog – I always find it interesting not only to see how many people visited, but where they got there from (search engine, direct URL, link on another site, etc.)  To my astonishment, it already had more traffic than it would normally have on a full “normal” day, and almost all of that traffic had come to the site within the previous 15 minutes.

The sudden rush of visitors came courtesy a link on a Lou Dobbs article on CNN.com.  For the next five hours, my little corner of the blogosphere averaged 2-3 visitors a minute, ending the day with roughly ten times the traffic I would normally have.

A week or so ago I wrote a piece about the flap over Barack Obama’s flag lapel pin (“Much Ado About Nothing.”) That post popped up on a search and was reviewed by someone at Sphere who flagged it as a featured link for the Lou Dobbs’ article on the same topic on CNN.com (“Our Flag Belongs to All Americans“) (If you click on the “From the Blogs” text the link is on the top of the blog links).

But just to make sure that I didn’t get the big head about all of this, my blog traffic was down to roughly pre-Lou-Dobbs-is-my-new-best-friend range just a mere 24 hours later.

It sure was exciting while it lasted!