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March 21, 2010
5 Comments

How much traffic do you get from being on the front page of Hacker News?

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Last week’s post “Sell Ice Cream, Not Cream and Ice” received 30X the traffic that I my blog posts normally receive.

Normally I get about 50 to 100 visits per post, but this time my post was voted onto the front page of Hacker News and ended up getting 2,530 visits over a three day period.

Here’s the breakdown:

  • 1,542 from Hacker News
  • 574 direct
  • 50 from twitter.com
  • 49 from craigslist
  • 32 from jimmyr.com
  • 200+ from various others

Thoughts and observations:

  • “Direct” is probably various twitter clients, mobile apps and email that do not send referrer information.
  • Craigslist? like, wtf?   This was directed at my earlier post, “Crucial first hire: the do-it-all office admin“, which was used in a job advert posted by ThinkSpace, an office coworking provider for startups.
  • Average blog traffic before this post:  about 15 visits / day
  • Average blog traffic after this post:  about 30 / day
  • JimmyR.com is an interesting blog and news aggregator that I’ve never heard of, but it shows the power of syndication for traffic
  • I gained about 30 twitter followers @jheitzeb.
  • I’m not sure how many times my post was shared on twitter since not all were shared through tweetmeme and a lot of the RT’s did not credit my twitter name and changed the post title

Reflections, Startups , ,
  • http://www.thinkspace.com Peter Chee

    I was wondering if you were going to see a spike in website traffic from my job posting on Craigslist! I almost emailed you to tell you I was linking to your article. It's been interesting to see the difference it makes when you post a job posting on Craigslist that directs them to your article — the cover letters I'm seeing are definitely improving. I was so tired of seeing the same damn cover letter where someone has just replaced the company name or job title with their generic cover letter. One cover letter was so good and stood out in a realm all by itself that I wanted to hire the person on that alone.

  • http://currentlyobsessed.com/ joe heitzeberg

    That's awesome to hear! So you think it makes a difference? That's cool. In describing a job – especially at a scrappy start-up, it's a good idea to set expectations up front to scare away the boneheads and attract the people who are looking for a unique and special opportunity.

  • http://www.shaynnablaze.com/ ShaynnaB

    Great breakdown of Traffic – the great thing about all these posts, twitter and how they connect is you never know who will see your work!

  • http://www.cashforprofits.info/ Leonard Harmon

    I am sorry to here about someone had said that your blog was a hacker site.

    But the good turn out for visiter's to your blog site.

    And good luck.

  • http://twitter.com/mashagenzel Mariya Genzel

    Joe, I'd like to see how much of that spike stays :)