Not too sure what happened the other day when my database just decided to blow up and not produce anything to my readers. Yesterday my blog was bombarded with traffic because of one specific post. Several traffic sources resulted into it and I my database just decided to give up.
I was going to update my blog later last night and when I tried to login I had a database issue and I was furious! I immediately called up my hosting provider and asked for immediate help. I swear my service providers' customer support is so useless - they can not tell me anything except test the domain then create a ticket - WTF! Luckily Twitter was on my side and Nate Whitehill and Shawn Collins came to the rescue. I called up my service provider about 3 times to see what the updates were and what the issues were.
Since they were no help, I went to my web logs and tried to see if I was being attacked by a bot from a single IP, Shawn thought I was being hit. Everything looked normal to me and I found 1 specific post to be very popular. It seems my earnings caught attention and caught attention fast. I was a little confused because it isn't a six figure check like the big guys were doing. It is just a small snippet of what I was earning with a nice ROI from my Adwords campaign.
But since I received no help from my service provider and friends on twitter helped me I went ahead and redirected the domain to my other website which is a small site about my startup company. I even posted to what the issue was and now I am writing this because I finally have access to my blog, wow imagine all those hours getting continuous traffic and you have to redirect it because of a DB error and too many connections.
Nate has proposed to install WP-Cache which I recently just did and hope it will serve me well. I believe I have installed a cache system on my blog prior but it has literally slowed it down, I hope it does not. But I will see if it has helped or not - I have read a lot of good things about Wp-Cache so I hope the same results with my blog.
I also was mentioned on Paul's Blog at UberAffiliate.com for Charity Check Tuesday, which brought good traffic as well. I simply was surprise to see multiple views on my earnings screen shot even though I have yet to produce 6 figures, was it my ROI that caught others attention or just the screen shot itself? I am uncertain to why my screen shot post was very popular.
Even my analytics shows the big increase of traffic and spike from that single post. I am not sure what it is that gets people's attention about numbers and entrepreneurs posting their checks and statistics. I think it brings a lot of curiosity and the fact that 'there is a chance' feeling for the beginners.
I think maybe it is the curiosity - I receive congrats and received a lot of help from many of my readers. There is a chance and the screen shot shows anyone can do it as long as you keep focus and take pride in what you are doing. I believe by me showing a small amount as a beginner shows there is a chance for others to jump into affiliate marketing and especially in PPC. I have learned a lot and now I need to learn to scale it and assure its continuous growth.
So this is a lesson learned posting earnings screen shot create curiosity and creates a viral action which will crash your database. Don't know if that is a good or bad thing.