Thursday, January 05, 2006

The traffic report

Over the last three days the first Carnival of Homeschooling has gotten about 4200 visits. The carnival post went up Monday night about 10:30 PM. I sent out emails to those who were in the carnival asking them to double check the carnival for correctness. Through the night our blog got between twenty to thirty hits every hour. By Tuesday morning three submitters reported some slight changes were needed.

About 9:00 AM Tuesday morning I started sending out emails to various bloggers who I thought might be willing to mention the first Carnival of Homeschooling. All total there were about sixty people I contacted asking them to consider posting on their blog a reference to the carnival. Slowly through the morning Site Meter reported a steady climb in the number of visits. We started getting 50 visits an hour, then 75, and then a hundred. We were lucky enough to get mentioned by Glen Reynolds on Instapundit at 5:13 PM (PST) and the number of hits sky rocketed to 200 an hour with a peak of 250 in one hour. During Tuesday we got just over 1800 visits.

During the night and through the early morning the visits per hour fell to the 25 to 50 range. Around 7:00 AM the second half of the Instapundit wave came through. It was a little bit lower, with a peak of 150 hits per hour. It dropped off by 1:00 PM. The rest of the day was fairly light, slowly dropping off as the day wore on. For Wednesday we got just over 1600 visits.

Thursday has been a slower day. The morning was very slow until around 9:00 AM when we got hit with another wave, this time from Attack of the killer robots - Clicked! The peak was a bit lower than Instapundit, reaching only to about 150 per hour. It took about ten hours before the wave petered out.

In the three days of the Carnival of Homeschooling being up over 4200 visitors have come to look at the carnival. Since our normal traffic is in the 30 to 50 visits a day, almost all of this is due to the carnival. About half of the 4200 visitors are due to Instapundit. About a quarter are due to Attack of the killer robots - Clicked! The rest came from roughly 40 blogs.

In looking at the Site Meter data for the blogs in the Carnival of Homeschooling, it appears that most submitters got around an extra 100 hits so far. In the seven blogs I check it appeared that pretty much everyone got about an extra 50 hits on Tuesday and another 40 hits on Wednesday. This was hard to tell with blogs that already had a large amount of traffic. For blogs which Site Meter showed a low amount of traffic in December, I estimated that most of the increase came from the carnival.

The traffic now is in the 30 to 50 hits an hour range.

It has been a lot of fun. I am looking forward to seeing how other bloggers host the Carnival of Homeschooling.

6 comments:

Kim C. said...

Thanks again for your work and willingness to act on a great idea!
Be sure to consider submitting the Homeschool Carnival to Carnival Cat if you haven't done so already. It's *the* place to find out about carnivals and makes submissions very easy too.

Anonymous said...

Thank you so much for your hard work in putting the Carnival together. This was my first carnival, and I noticed the increase in traffic to my blog this week.

I loved how you wove the blog entries into the different carnival segments.

Have a blessed day! Tami

Henry Cate said...

Allison, I don't understand quite what your are asking. What do you mean by your site to miscellaneous?

You were in the Carnival of Homeschooling. This post was included in the carnival:

http://allisontannery.blogsome.com/2005/12/31/a-little-learning

I am surprised that you haven't seen any traffic. The eight sites that have public Site Meter all showed a dramatic increase of traffic over the last four days. And two other bloggers said they had seen a dramatic increase in the traffic to their sites.

Are you sure you haven't see some traffic from the Carnival?

Dee Paolina said...

I think she means to be listed in your blogroll.

Henry Cate said...

I am kicking around a couple ideas for expanding our blogroll. Currently I've listed the blogs that I check out almost every day. But there are another hundred that I check out once a week, or a couple times a month. I'd like to include them some how, but I find super long lists of three hundred blogs overwhelming.

I've been thinking about this for awhile and I'm going to try something out in the next couple days. I'm going to leave the side bar as it is, and put new blogs at the bottom of our blog. I'll have a brief mention in the side bar of more at the bottom. This way if people want to find even more blogs, then can check out the list at the bottom.

ChristineMM said...

As a participant in the CoH I have already noticed a big difference depending on whether the host's blog is showing up in Technorati.

The contributors to the CoH, IMO, will receive more traffic as will the host, if they configure their blog to be known to Technorati and it would be even better if they joined Technorati (free) and used the new tag system in their CoH announcement post.

I am just now learning about Technorati tags.

With my blog's site meter I can see how people navigate to my blog and it is clear when they come through from the CoH host's site.