Why I Hate Traffic Spikes

There is a rush when you see a post that gets a lot of attention. I remember Hutch Carpenter experiencing something similar when he had his “Cisco Fatty” post.

But after the moment passes and you look back, there’s a bunch of negative things that slowly emerge from the experience. I will share with you some of the ones I have thought of.

But first, a little backstory. On November 17th I received an invitation to try a Microsoft installer, which I mistakingly thought was related to Azure, Microsoft’s Cloud Computing service to come out next year. I wrote a post about how this could be a great thing for Cloud providers, allowing non-technical users to deploy cloud-aware apps using an iPhone application metaphor. A fellow FriendFeeder posted it on Hacker News, and from there, the post registered an amazing flurry of visits. The post stayed on the home page of Hacker News for most of the day.

So here’s what I gathered as the post’s traffic died down 3 days later.

• Spikes on Analytics distort your overall view. I am now left with a small horizontal line that doesn’t let me really get a feel of how the blog is doing. I wish there was an option to take that day out of my report, so that I can see the real picture.
• Most of the traffic doesn’t stick. The before and after subscriber numbers didn’t change at all. These types of traffic are mostly “one visit and forget about your blog” type. The subscriber number did spike as well, but I think this is a false inflation that Feedburner detects, but it’s not real.
• It gives you a false sense of success. Suddenly you see that day’s traffic and multiply it by 30 and you’re now up there with the big boys. It doesn’t happen like that. You need to keep writing, for years, before that happens my friends. You also don’t feel like blogging for a while, because your monthly metric is now so much higher than your previous month’s — even though the event happened in the middle of the month.
• You get very tired for days after the event. I stopped thinking about new posts for days because my mind was still reeling from the false success factor.
• You suddenly are challenged to do an even better follow post, which is unlikely. I guess this is related to the previous one, but you are now defeated in your own turf, pressuring yourself to follow up with an even bigger post.

At the end of the day, there’s little benefits from these spikes, and you shouldn’t put too much energy on them. You might have a nice graph to show yourself on the monthly reports, but the real takeaway is that these are isolated events that should be mostly ignored and forgotten by the next day.

The only positive thing you should learn from a spike is trying to figure out if there’s a formula you can extract from it that you can apply for future posts. In my case, I was extrapolating a “now” event into the future, which might have captivated user’s imagination, which is something I often try on my blog. It would look like this is something I’ve got to keep trying.

Looking forward to your comments.