Another major traffic spike to my blog happened on January 19, 2015, when total unique visitor count reached 3,584.
Update: Read how I got 10,000 page views in day a year later.
Previous or first major traffic spike happened about a year ago on January 24, 2014, when unique's totalled in more than 1,000.
I believe there will be some who are going to smile about such results, I mean those of you who are receiving traffic more than 5,000 unique visitors per day, but for me - well, it's a great achievement. Best so far!
Traffic Spike more than 3,500 unique visitors per day
As you can see in above image my traffic went up on January 19, 2015 and totalled in 3,584 unique visitors.
First thing I was concerned when I noticed a traffic surge - will my VPS will handle this spike, there was no need to be worried, my Linode VPS handled it with ease:
Linode VPS CPU Usage
Nothing unusual here, got around 32% of CPU on January 19, 2015
Linode VPS Network Usage
The only thing I noticed on my Linode VPS - increase in outgoing network traffic.
This leads me to think that with my existing server configuration I could go up to 100,000 monthly visitors without headaches, but I'm not 100% sure about that.
What made such traffic spike?
In July I wrote a post about minimum wages in European Union in 2014. At the end of 2014 that post started to gain some attention, got shared on several forums and then (as I believe) got shared on Facebook.
As of today that post has attracted 330 Facebook shares and likes.
The country of origin - Lithuania. I believe for Lithuanians it was interesting to compare their minimum wage with rest of European Union member states.
If you are interested in minimum wages in EU, please, feel free to visit that post and compare.
Traffic from Lithuania accounted for 54.65%
When first traffic spike happened to my blog I wrote following words about things I probably did wrong:
What about social share buttons - again wrong - I have removed them from site. So nobody, had possibility to share this link, and get even greater exposure.
So it's time to implement Google Adsense the right way, add social share buttons, and wait for another traffic spike.
It has been already a one year since I said that - what has changed?
- Social Share Buttons - I have putted them back, I believe they helped in this case to attract more shares and likes
- Google Adsense - A lot has changed in last year - Google Adsense is not any more my main income stream, but I have done several Google Adsense tests and implemented them on my blog. Speaking of that particular day when this traffic spike happened i earned a little more than $1.00. It's a pathetic result - I believe most of you will agree on that. On the second hand, since most of traffic come from Lithuania that day, and Lithuania is not that country with pretty high CPC. I would say little bit more than $1.00 is OK.
I decided to compare how well I was prepared for second traffic spike,and compared that one with first one:
Traffic Spike 2015 vs Traffic Spike 2014
First - this time I got 3 times more traffic than first time, the stats that makes me glad are:
- Average session duration: it's up for 144.42% from 18 seconds in 2014 to 44 seconds in 2015
- Bounce rate: It's down by -4.16% from 91.00% in 2014 to 87.22% in 2015
- Average page per session is the same: 1.15
In Conclusion (Waiting for third traffic spike)
Traffic spikes come and go, I'm not focusing on traffic spikes, I'm more interested in steady (predictable) traffic growth. One thing is common for traffic spikes, they might come a a surprise (as it happened this time and did happened first time to my blog).
One thing you should pay attention is your hosting plan, either you sit on a shared hosting or have your VPS, investigate how much traffic it can handle. Speaking of me - I believe my existing server configuration could handle up to 10,000 unique visitors in a day (of course, time will show)
I believe you won't get rich if you are montezing your site with Google AdSense only, in case some of your affiliate posts goes viral I believe there is a huge chance to earn some decent chunk of money from that.