Visitor flood

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The previous blog post, "On students' cognitive inability" proved to be very popular. Very very popular. It was in fact the most popular blog post I've ever written. So how did that happen?

- I published the blog post a week ago, on Saturday (March 23).
- I thought that particular blog post could be of interest also to others (beyond my ordinary readers), so a I sent a mail about it to some blogger friends of mine (March 26).
- One extremely popular blog (Cornucopia) wrote a blog post of his own one day later (March 27), linking to my blog post. This is what happened afterwards to the number of page views of my blog:

The number of visitors on that one day would in fact have made it (that day) one of the very most popular months ever as the visitors (page views) for March shot through the roof:

Here's what the number of page views for all the blog post published in March looks like:

Do also note the number of comment; 20 comments during the month of March of which 19 are comments to the very last blog post (several of the comments are written by me though).

This has happened once before, when I wrote the blog post "Can a student fail at a Swedish university?" two years ago (838 page views as of now). The same blog linked to the blog post and set a recored that was beaten only this past week. One reason there were more visitors now than two years ago is that his blog has become more popular since.

So, based on this event as well as earlier experiences, I can safely draw the conclusion that the way to get many visitors to a blog has less to do with the topic and the quality of what you write and more to do with getting linked-to ("I think, therefore I am. I link, therefore you are"). That would include finding your appropriate "blog neighbors" and then reading and linking to their stuff (in the hope that they will link to your stuff of course). You could also leave comments and link back to your own blog ("read more about this in a blog post I wrote last week...").

I don't really work on that in regards to this blog. I'm not aiming for maximizing the number of readers and visitors; people who find the blog find the blog, people who don't don't. But it's fun to get a lot of readers now and then anyway. The easiest way to make that happen would be to write about controversial topics and to become a pundit (expressing strong opinions about this-and-that). I don't aim at doing that, but it might happen that I have strong opinions about controversial topic X now and then anyway...
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