How few Tweets resulted in increased my traffic by 370%

The other night, I found out the author/marketer Chris Brogan was in town. I am a big fan of his and his book Trust agents, so I wanted to go see him. I will not go through all the details in the tweet Exchange — you can read about how I wound up not meeting him on my blog.

Photograph of Aidan Jones, licensed under the Creative Commons

As a result, to meet him, however, I had a conversation with him via Twitter. So I wrote up a post about what I learned from not meeting him, and I put his name in the title when I tweeted out to my followers. Chris had been notified, and he retweeted it to their followers, with the label, "very nice story."

That doesn't sound interesting, will it take? I mean, Chris doesn't know me, has certainly never met me, and it was a tweet. But by putting their stamp of approval on it, publicly urging people to Chris read my article – and he has over 177,000 supporters. In a few minutes, I had an influx of traffic (see screenshot below). These are not numbers to write home about, but when you are on average 50 to 60 visitors per day, 185 safe is a great hope – particularly in the span of a few hours!

"Brogan effect" – an hour distribution of traffic on that day

It would never have happened if I had decided to go meet Chris but do not tell him about this. I had to break the ice with him first and give it a shot. By that I was on their radar, and that is how my post was tweeted to his supporters.

It taught me some very important lessons about the network:

Don't be afraid to introduce you for large dogs. Chris Brogan, in small interaction I've had with him, seems to be quite a really nice guy, and my post only brought more people said the same thing to me about him. Twitter has such a low barrier to entry that it gives you the opportunity to connect with just about anyone who is there, and most of them are just ordinary people.You must be genuine. If I had gone in this interaction with Chris and pure was motivated by the thought, "Hey, maybe I can get some free traffic to my blog," he would have sniffed that out pretty quickly. He would have nothing to do with me – and he would be right. Sometimes you have to catch it and remind yourself of motivation for your actions. The rest of it will take care of itself. Just focus on building the relationship. It was an opportunity that I saw when I found out Chris was in town.Be active in your efforts. One of my favorite stories of networks is my friend Jacob Sokol adventure with author and well-known entrepreneur, Gary Vaynerchuk, a New York Jets football game. He reached to Gary proactively and regularly get spectacular – and on Garys conditions. Sometimes, it feels like a throwaway. Chris, I tweeted that I Centre to see him just on a whim, where he controlled his Twitter feed while he was out. I never thought that he would respond, let alone do something of this. But it happened because I took action.Don't ask for anything. This goes along with authenticity. I asked Chris not to tweet my post. I hope he would read it, but I did not ask him to read it. I just let him know it was there. It is the same thing I did when I got 19 other people to share their small performances with me: I told them, ' this is it, this is done, read it if you want, and thank you. " Most of them took it upon himself to share it with their followers. Instead of asking for something, work hard to do what you do to be noticeable and different. Let your sincerity show through, and this is what motivates people to share your stuff – not because you asked, but because they want to.

As a result, I have new readers and a few new followers on Twitter – and I never even met the guy.

Do you have any experiences like this, where a small contact led to a burst of traffic for your blog? I would like to hear about them in the comments.

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