The Brogan Effect

Last week, I witnessed the direct impact of a referral from Chris Brogan on my blog traffic, and I thought it was significant enough to share.

After having not blogged since December, I finally got back in the blogging habit last week. One of those posts, about the reasons people don't talk to each other at social events, grabbed a lot of attention on Twitter -- and the bulk of that attention was driven by a single re-tweet from Brogan:

My friend @justinkownacki doesn't want to meet you - http://is.gd/jihd

True to the form of a verified thought leader, Brogan's acolytes ignored his warning and swarmed my blog in huge numbers. (Huge for me, anyway.)

By the Numbers

* According to Lijit, my normal weekday traffic (as measured by their service) hovers somewhere between 30 and 40 hits per day.

* On Thursday of last week -- the day of the blog post mentioned by Brogan -- my traffic jumped to 769 views. (That's 21 times my normal traffic.)

* I have over 2,000 followers on Twitter; Chris Brogan has over 40,000 followers. That means Chris has approximately 20 times the reach I have on Twitter.

* That one retweet by Chris of my initial blog post announcement was then retweeted at least 6 times by Chris Brogan's followers.

* My Friday traffic also jumped to 224 views, which is 7 times my normal traffic.

* I gained over 100 Twitters followers on the day that blog post hit; most of whom were already following Chris, but not me.

Admittedly, Some Other Things to Keep in Mind...

* The blog post itself was titled "I Don't Want to Meet You." It doesn't take Copyblogger to tell you that contentious blog titles often elicit clicks and rewteets.

* In point of fact, my own mentions of this post on Twitter were retweeted at least 7 times all by themselves.

* Influence is disparate. Fellow Twitterer Lily Hill also drove new traffic here, with her followers retweeting her mention of my post another 2 or 3 times.

* Despite the influx of new readers (and commenters), my RSS subscriptions only jumped by 6 people.

So What's It All Mean?

* It's currently impossible to track EXACTLY how much traffic was driven by any one of the mentions of my blog post on Twitter, so all traffic estimates are just that -- educated guesses.

* It's often hard to tell which retweets come from where, since people often paraphrase the original in order to fit within the 140 characters while also hopefully giving proper attribution to where they found it.

* Either most blog readers still aren't using RSS subscription tools, or the new readers who came here via Chris and Lily decided that the *rest* of my blog output wasn't worth subscribing to.

And, of course, the one undeniable truth:

* In the aftermath of a huge awareness spike, I now feel the need to be INCREDIBLY RELEVANT to anyone who stumbled across my blog and now expects pearls of Brogan-approved wisdom on a daily basis.

Or, as Randy (one of Brogan's followers) put it:

Glad @ChrisBrogan yelled it out, he's rarely wrong, if ever

So if I think *I* have pressure meeting people's expectations, something tells me Chris's followers' expectations for *him* are almost Neo-like. (Somehow, I doubt that makes either of us sleep any easier at night.)

Photo by m0xie.