If you’re mentioned on a big blog it’s important to make the most of that exposure and that’s exactly what I did after being mentioned on John Chow’s blog when he wrote about the Seattle Blogger Meetup. I was near certain that he would link to my blog when he wrote about the so I purposefully wrote my thoughts on the meetup that night and followed up with an entry on 5 of my favorite posts the next day. I wanted the readers that came to my blog from John Chow’s to see some of my better stuff so that they might stick around and keep coming back. Much to my delight, I was linked to in his post about the blogger meetup.

I was excited about the link but I was even more excited with how my strategy worked! After getting mentioned on his blog my traffic has stayed at a much higher and consistent level of about 3 - 4 times the amount of page views a day compared to what I was receiving before. I believe part of the reason why the traffic has stayed at a fairly consistent level after riding the first surge of the wave has been due to the quality of my posts. Overall I’ve focused on writing more frequently and on topics I knew would interest my readers, but you can’t dismiss the initial tidal wave of traffic I received from his blog contributing to the higher traffic levels. This is the same type of strategy that was used when I helped launch my first forum with my halo 2 video Untouchable. The video was posted on one of the largest Halo websites in the world and targeted the type of people that I wanted to come to my website (gamers that enjoy watching game videos). Just like how a post on John Chow’s blog targets readers I’d like to check out my blog. Do I believe that being mentioned on John Chow’s blog was the best thing that could have happened ever? Of course not, but the fact that I have been able to continue on while consistently averaging more page views per day compared to before the traffic surge is great.

The important things to remember are that you must make the most of the traffic wave while you’re at the top. That’s one key element to riding the traffic wave coupled with your ability to spot opportunities to ride traffic waves. That’s why it sucks for people that don’t have a server that can handle the front page of Digg. They miss out on all the extra exposure and then have to deal with their server being down for the regular readers! In any case, I already have several more posts lined up that I believe will help me to continue to find more and more traffic waves to ride on.

Which traffic waves have you ridden on lately?