My sports blog had around 200 to 250 visitors per day until mid-September. In two weeks' time that figure has increased and yesterday my gambling blog hit 1000+ visitors! Is such a big increase in blog traffic possible in just 14 days? Obviously yes but the reason was a post I published discussing the forthcoming Greek Election which attracted a lot of attention and nowadays it receives about half of my blog's traffic. In a way I predicted such a development due to other posts resulting in traffic spikes and in fact I added more content about the Greek Election which also received a lot of traffic. Those two posts get about 80% of my daily blog's traffic nowadays!

I had experienced such a blog traffic increase in the past when I had published articles about betting on the Oscar Academy awards, betting on Olympics 2008 and betting on the US Presidential Election. However discussing about the Greek Presidential Election resulted to even more traffic and pushed my blog in the first places in google searches about betting on greek election. Of course SEF links helped. Being in the first 3 places in google for popular searches such "bet greek election", "greek election bet", "greek election 2009" and so on helped my sports blog increase its Alexa Rank as well and yesterday it read below 100,000. However that traffic increase did not result in an increase of blog readers through Feedburner, although my gambling was much better prepared than before. Maybe people were searching for something they didn't find interesting in my original post. The PR4 though wasn't affected either since the last time my blog's Google Pagerank increased.

Still, traffic in a blog can mean a lot of things other than readership increase, one of which is money of course. Upon finding out the interest in my blog post, I included a couple of banners and advertising to it, seeking a couple of new signups but up to now the performance is subpar. Other than that I focused on increasing the actual page views, as I noticed most of the people visiting my blog post left without looking at other pages of my sports blog. For that reason I added the follow-up article about the election polls in the end and immediately a large percentage of the visitors read 2 articles per visit. Of course there are instances where a visitor saw 30 or more posts and staying for more than an hour in my blog. A few exceptions that I find quite exciting!

Today my blog's traffic has already broken above the 1000 figure and I guess the traffic will peak tonight since the election is held tomorrow. I expect the traffic to return to my blog's standards by Tuesday.

If you are looking to start your own sports blog, don't forget to read 5 tips for your gambling blog.