What can the legitimate press do? In April 2010, I had a sudden spike in the number of reads for THE Canadian Financial Blog (basically a quadrupling of my regular readers) for about 2 days. It took me a while to figure out where the traffic was coming from.
Two weeks ago, I wrote a piece about Sunday Banking that I didn’t think much of, but it was an opinion post, and I feel sometimes I need to get things like that off my chest. It did include a good catchphrase, I thought, with Impulse Banking, but the only reaction I got was a tirade from 1 commenter and a bunch of folks on Reddit commenting about what a Neo-Fascist I was trying to impinge on their rights to bank on Sundays, OK, fine, I never understand why some people like some of my writing and then other things cause visceral reactions.
Power of the Press
Fast forward to this week and my sudden explosion in readership. I finally was able to track down that the spike was caused by a post by Rob Carrick, Whatever Happened to Banker’s Hours, which mentions me at the beginning, and doesn’t say much more. Holy cow, I was getting hit counts during the day that I don’t see ever. I was getting hits from iPhones and Androids all over the place, but unfortunately, this kind of spike rarely causes a big increase in RSS readership or the like, I need to work to make sure if this happens again, I try to hold onto the readership a little more. The mainstream press mentions really do cause spikes in readership.
My continued work on Social Media has caused me to create another Facebook account (I have one for my normal persona), but I have created Theo B. Cajunman, as a place to post stories to Facebook, we shall see where this might lead, as I have set up Hootsuite to post there as well. I still can’t see where Facebook would help with readership, but I am also willing to listen. Those press mentions sure do pay off.