The “TechCrunch Bump” Isn’t Magic for Small Blogs
Back in early December 2007, Mike Arrington wrote a TechCrunch post that linked to this blog. His post sent over a horde of TC readers AKA the "TechCrunch bump".
At the time, I thought it was going to give my blog a huge reader base that would cling to my every word post after post. Well, that's not what happened. As you can see above, the "TechCrunch bump" quickly dissipated and returned to pre-bump numbers in little time.
What lesson can small blogs take away from my experience?
Just because TC and its readers find one of your posts interesting doesn't mean they will find your future posts interesting.
Why? Because if you have small blog (traffic-wise) it probably means a couple of things:
1) It's your personal blog (like this blog). And, most personal blogs are only interesting to the author and a couple of his or her friends.
2) You cover an array of topics (like this blog). There's only a few blogs that cover tons of topics and are also popular (i.e. Kottke.org). Most popular blogs cover very narrow topics and become the definitive source for those topics (i.e. TechCrunch and Web 2.0 startups).
3) Your blog is relatively new. It takes awhile for readers, Googlebot and other bloggers to find your blog. Just because they find one post doesn't mean they find the rest of your blog (A result of #1 and #2).
All in all, you shouldn't focus on getting magical links from huge blogs. Instead, you should ignore the huge blogs and focus on posting content from your own distinctive voice day after day.
As you can see above, it's been about five months since my small blog got the "TechCrunch bump" and I'm only up to about 20% of the daily readers I got from the bump.
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