Like every new blogger, my dream of success meant getting a business superstar to share my content online. I was convinced that validation from a celebrity tweet would change everything and propel me into the sunny skies of Internet fame and fortune.
About two years into my blogging career, to my surprise and delight, my dream came true. One of my blog posts was tweeted by marketing superstar Guy Kawaski, who has a Twitter following roughly the size of France.
As soon as he tweeted the post (on a Friday) my traffic surged, and over the weekend the number of people finding my site was 500 percent greater than the normal rate. Briefly, the Guy-traffic crashed my server and shut down my website. Look at me—I went viral!
The vanity of “traffic”
When you go viral, you naturally reach a lot of new people outside the comfortable “normal” audience you’ve built over time. In fact, about 98 percent of the tidal wave of readers over that weekend had never been to the blog before (something that is easily determined through an analytics program). I had a full weekend of blog tourists!
