The Greplin Effect

Yesterday, we published a Greplin review in our Panopticonic blog, and the surge in traffic for that review was incredible.  We had 1,102 views for that review alone.  I call that massive influx of readers “The Greplin Effect.”  Here’s a comparison chart over time that shows you the massive Greplin bump we experienced yesterday and today:

So far, this morning, we’re at 428 views of our Greplin review.  That is an amazing metric considering our daily traffic on that blog is much more modest than most of our other blogs — you give up a lot of bandwidth cohesion when you publish 14 blogs instead of just one or two — but we don’t mind the traffic splintering, because we’re in this for the long haul, and because we like the division of niche intentions.

As I look at the social networking information at the bottom of that Greplin review, I am also surprised and pleased to see we had 14 Tweets and eight Facebook likes.  That’s pretty good for that blog.  We prefer comments — and we received some interesting commentary on that article — but today, unlike five years ago, people seem to prefer to Tweet and Like instead of directly joining in a blog discussion.  Five years ago, those Tweets and Likes would have been comments.  Yes, I’m crying a little bit into my social networking barf bucket.

“The Greplin Effect” is an even more powerful traffic boost than when Boles Blues was featured on WordPress.com’s Freshly Pressed:

I will now share my quick view stats for Boles Blogs from yesterday. I took the screenshot below around midnight last night, so the graph demonstrates 14 hours of Freshly Pressed Exposure stewing (stewage?).

Remember, these backend stats can vary wildly from hour to hour and it takes a full day to get a realistic view of articles in performance, but as you can see, our average Page Views for Boles Blues were hovering around a 100 a day — again, not bad, and actually quite steady, for a new blog with only 100 posts — but after the WordPress.com Freshly Pressed exposure yesterday, we were jamming on 1,040 Page Views: TEN TIMES our normal daily average.

It is clear young, evil, SuperGenius Daniel Gross, has created a monster service that interests a lot of people, and who knew simply writing about Greplin would get us back such immense goodwill in readership and fresh eyes on our content?  I wonder if it would be possible to write a daily Greplin review in an insane attempt to re-amplify The Greplin Effect across the life an entire blog network?  “Greplin Ate My Homework.”  “Greplin Found My Lost Love and Married Her.”  “Greplin Placed a Prank Google Voice Phone Call to President Obama for Me This Morning.”