What Seth Godin did to me

There I was blogging away on August 30th when I decided to send an email to marketing guru Seth Godin to let him know how much I enjoyed his latest post and that I would be linking to his site on my blog. With a couple hours, I received an email from Seth back saying, "I blogged you right back. Nice site." I was stunned to have even received a response, yet alone a small entry on his site linking to my site. Within minutes the traffic started... and then it exploded.
For the first 29 days of August I had less than 500 visitors total. Within 48 hours of Seth's post, Don't Tell the Donor had almost 3,000 visitors. Several days later, Raw Story linked to my story on the Humane Society merger and the site received another "pop" of over 600 visitors in 24 hours. While both spikes have now subsided, it is an honor to have built a consistent daily readership of 50-70 visitors.

The experience has been an interest one and taught me a lot about how viral marketing principles apply in the blogosphere. It has given me encouragment to continue this experiment in blogging on the stories behind the stories with fundraising news. My desire to keep publishing relevant news through humorous delivery is strong and I hope to continue building a loyal readership.

Thank you to Seth Godin for plugging the site and thanks to the editors at Raw Story for including one of our headlines in their news list... and thanks to all of you with daily feeds or RSS links to the site. I appreciate all the emails of encouragement. I look forward to incorporating your suggestions in the future.