How I Went From 0 – 20,000 Unique Hits in 1 Day

One evening a few years ago, I decided to put up my 4th ad at a very popular website. I had put up a few test ads before this and I had received only about 20 – 30 visitors per ad. It was definitely nothing to write home about. When I had run those first ads, I made sure the webpage I was directing them to had great content and that all my Pay-Per-Click ads were working great. Sometimes the pay-per-click programs can’t find the right keywords so they put up very unrelated ads. Anyway, the night I put up my 4th ad, I had forgotten to check and see if I was getting relevant ads for the page. It really didn’t even matter to me because I was only expecting 20 – 30 visitors. As you can tell from the title of this article, you know what happened next. I woke up the next morning and saw that I had about 1,500 people to my page. Remember now, this page was not worked on the right way, and there were absolutely no ads showing up on the page. All the code was right, but, all that showed up was an advertisement for the pay-per click company. My heart started racing when I saw this because I knew there really wasn’t much I could do at this point. 1,500 people were way more than I expected. Like an idiot…. Instead of relocating and retouching the page, I left it there. If I was smart I would have had the page they were entering redirect to another page, but, I knew I had to leave for a conference and wanted to get there really early. Besides, I figured that everybody who was going to go to that page had already visited it. Little did I know that this tiny little page was going to become viral. When I was at the conference I didn’t have the opportunity to check my stats. So, I didn’t realize how many people were coming to the website throughout the day. When I got home that night, I checked my stats and found that almost 20,000 unique visitors came to that page throughout the day. I was crushed. I had absolutely zero clicks. How 1,500 clicks turned into 20,000 in one day.

The reason I ended up getting so many clicks was Digg picked up the story as well as Fark, and a whole host of blogs, etc… I ended up receiving over 100,000 unique visitors by the time the craziness was over. Luckily, I eventually created a redirect page which gave great ads and, of course, gave me a great payout.

Here was the good news, though. By the end of that month my Alexa ranking for that site was incredible. All the search engines picked it up, and it turned out to eventually be a success story. Unfortunately, though, the material on the page was time sensitive and people lost interest rather quickly. Lesson LearnedHere’s the lesson…. Put 100% effort in everything you do, because you don’t know when you are going to catch lightning in a bottle. Don’t be the person who lost their lottery ticket and didn’t care because they figured they weren’t going to win anyway