What the Frontpage of Reddit Does To A New Blog In 24 Hours

I decided to add my post on not checking your email first or last thing to Reddit almost exactly 24 hours ago. Since then, I’ve had the honor of being on the Reddit frontpage for all but one of those blissful hours, and has just recently been knocked from the frontpage.

I have recieved huge amounts of traffic in a short period of time, as well as many subscribers to my feed. This could be very interesting to a lot of people because my blog is so new. That post was only my 4th on this blog, and I had almost no traffic whatsoever. All of the visits I’ve recieved in the past 24 hours are virtually all from Reddit. So consider this a case study on how much traffic you can recieve if your blog is on the frontpage of Reddit for 24 hours.Reddit Stats

The highest I ever saw the post ever get to was 7th. It hung out in the top 10 for at least 7-8 hours. (I’m not sure on some of this because I had to get some sleep). The article has gotten 171 points, and has had 21 comments. I had a puny link karma of 2 before submitting this piece, and now that the smoke is clearing, it’s up at 46. Although I’m not entirely clear on what Karma does, I think it should help with posting new articles down the road.

Raw Traffic

I use Performancing Metrics to handle my blog analytics. It’s really robust and easy to set up, not to mention it’s free. I was able to break down my traffic statistics by the hour. To this point I’ve recieved at least 7,980 total visits from Reddit. The highest point of the day was around 3pm (US Central Time), with almost 900 visits within the hour. This was right around the time my post had climbed up into the top 10.



Geography

The geographics of the users sent to me are pretty interesting too. 64% of the users were from the US, 8% from Canada, 7% from the UK, 3% from the Down Under and 2% from Germany. And I have no clue where 17% of the visitors are from.

Browsers

I am all about Firefox, so it was refreshing to see that 58% used it at Reddit. 16% used IE, 6% Safari and 19% used something else.

Interestingly enough, hardly anyone used a resolution under 1024×768.

Subscription Stats

Before Reddit I had no users signed up for LifeDev’s feed. I woke up this morning, and I kid you not, had 217 people subscribed to it. And that was just in about an 13 hour time period. I think I’ll put one of those little ego buttons on my site that shows how many people are subscribed. Look out TechCrunch!

As far as my email subscription goes, only 2 people signed up for my newsletter. But who cares? I’m still stoked about the feed subscription numbers ;)

Bookmarks, Technorati, etc.

I now have 18 people who favorited the story at Del.icio.us, and 7 more who favorited LifeDev.net. Technorati tells me that I’ve gotten 8 links from around the net, and it has sent my traffic rank down to 478,084. One of those links come from the infamous Jeremy Zawodny and his link blog.

Just for grins, at about 4pm (US Central time), I registered my blog at BlogTopSites.com, under the personal category. Of about 8,000 blogs, mine shot up to 4th this morning.

Adsense and Amazon

Because I can’t give exact amounts of earnings due to Adsense’s TOS, all I can tell you that I made well under $5. Interestingly enough, I sent 14 clicks out to the book I quoted at Amazon, and 2 people bought it. That’s some pretty good CTR.

Conclusions

Well, it’s pretty obvious that the traffic from Reddit has done wonders for my readership, especially the feed readership. Apparently Reddit users aren’t interested in ads, but will click and buy a recommended book. Because the Reddit crowd is techy and informed, they probably have a little banner blindness. That’s ok. Feed readership is most important to any blog that’s just starting. And mine certainly skyrocketed from a single front page posting at Reddit.