Do you remember the episode of "The Simpsons" where Disco Stu explains the sales potential of disco records to Marge? Stu points to a chart showing the sales of disco records from the years 1973 to 1976 and says, "Did you know that disco record sales were up 400% for the year ending 1976? If these trends continue... A-y-y-y!"I'm having a bit of an A-y-y-y moment right now. Generally my site averages around 300-400 unique visitors per day, with around 400-600 page loads. I know, a lot of you would kill for numbers like that, but you have to understand that it was a lot of work to get to this point. It's one thing to say that you'd kill for those numbers, but it's another thing entirely to go out to the freeway overpass every day with a burlap sack filled with mewing kittens.
Anyway, you see those two little icons at the bottom of this post? Yeah, those:
 Stumble it! | |  Digg it! |
StumbleUpon and Digg are "social networking sites," which seemed to be the big thing for a while. Maybe it still is. Whatever. Digg has never done me much good, but occasionally someone "Stumbles" one of my post and I get a few hundred hits out of it. And before you get too excited about adding the magical StumbleUpon icon to your posts, remember that only about one of twenty of my posts gets stumbled, and the number of hits I get from it is dependent on how many "friends" the Stumbler has in the StumbleUpon network. Basically, if a serious internet geek who spends way too much time making "friends" online really likes one of my posts, I get some traffic out of it.* And I should add that 99% of these visitors read a single post (if that) and then disappear, never to darken my IP address again. Since I'm really only interested in finding regular readers who will leave nice comments or maybe even buy my book, the net result of all this commotion is about on par with drinking eight MGDs in an hour and a half: A lot of Stumbling that culminates with me urinating in the orchard behind my house.
Sometimes there is an interesting snowball effect, however. In the past it's always burned out after I get around 1,000 visitors, but evidently my Straight Man post hit a chord (count the mixed metaphors in this paragraph and win a puppy!). One person Stumbled it, then another, and another.... So far, the results look like this:
I mean, holy crap, right? Even Saturday's traffic was about double for a normal Saturday, and it shot up like crazy after that. All because of a post that was just some goofy conversations I had with my wife.
Again, if you're a fellow blogger, feel free to add the Stumble icon to your posts (I think there are instructions at StumbleUpon.com), but don't come whining to me if you don't suddenly get thousands of visitors. This is truly a freak occurrence, and it only happened after a lot of hard work and dead kittens.
Still, if this trend continues, A-y-y-y!
*I don't mean to disparage you, Stumbler. I appreciate what you've done for me. But come on. Don't you, like, have a job or something?
Humor-blogs.com never urinates in my orchard.]]>