Well placed comments can double your web traffic

I have to start by saying that I don’t do a lot of marketing for this site. I write this blog as a way of collecting things that I think are cool. If other people read it, then it’s a bonus. Next month allthatscool will be 2 years old. In the beginning I was more diligent about adding content more frequently, and participating in conversations on other blogs. After a few months of doing allthatscool, I was averaging close to 500 uniques a day. Additionally, when some of my posts (Why you should start an internet company) got on digg and del.icio.us, traffic spiked as high as 10k uniques in a day. Then I end up with a consulting gig that took up a lot of my time and I kind of let the blog slip. Now I’m back with more frequent updates and have more time to read other blogs and comment here and there. So, that brings me to the point of this post: with one comment on Mashable earlier this week, my traffic spiked to more than double my average. I’ve been averaging around 200 daily uniques and when I left a comment on Mashable, in the number 3 spot, my traffic shot up to where it was when I first started this site. I’ve commented on many blogs in the past and have seen curiosity clickers visiting my site as a result. But, I’ve never had a spike such as the one that I received from Mashable. I’m not sure if that’s a testament to the Power of Mashable or if it’s something else. Either way, the moral of this story is, if you have some thing relative to add to a conversation on another blog, by all means, do, but make sure you get your comment in the first 10 or less. That way you’ll get maximum exposure. Below is stats from the last 30 days. The first spike is from Stumbleupon and the other is Mashable.