How much traffic do you get from being on the front page of Hacker News?

Last week’s post “Sell Ice Cream, Not Cream and Ice” received 30X the traffic that I my blog posts normally receive.

Normally I get about 50 to 100 visits per post, but this time my post was voted onto the front page of Hacker News and ended up getting 2,530 visits over a three day period.

Here’s the breakdown:

• 1,542 from Hacker News
• 574 direct
• 50 from twitter.com
• 49 from craigslist
• 32 from jimmyr.com
• 200+ from various others

Thoughts and observations:

• “Direct” is probably various twitter clients, mobile apps and email that do not send referrer information.
• Craigslist? like, wtf? This was directed at my earlier post, “Crucial first hire: the do-it-all office admin”, which was used in a job advert posted by ThinkSpace, an office coworking provider for startups.
• Average blog traffic before this post: about 15 visits / day
• Average blog traffic after this post: about 30 / day
• JimmyR.com is an interesting blog and news aggregator that I’ve never heard of, but it shows the power of syndication for traffic
• I gained about 30 twitter followers @jheitzeb.
• I’m not sure how many times my post was shared on twitter since not all were shared through tweetmeme and a lot of the RT’s did not credit my twitter name and changed the post title