Kevin Burton’s NEW FeedBlog

Interesting results from my funding experiment the other day.

Within 24 hours I had made $280. Within $48 hours I had made $300 (total). The rate of donation was directly proportional to my traffic.

Here’s a snapshot of my sitemeter stats. The last spike was my funding blog post.

Most of this traffic was the result of Scobelizer’s post. Unfortunately a lot of trolls jumped on his comment board and started bashing Windows. Sorry Robert!

The goal obviously is to boost donations so in order to do that I’ll have to boost traffic.

Any ideas on what to do better next time?

Here’s what I have in mind.

1. Release the meme on Tuesday morning when blog traffic is at its highest of the week (noon is the peak).

2. Try to pull other bloggers into the conversation. Find something that makes them tick and link to it. For example if you get N dollars you’ll add a special feature that they might care about.

3 Keep the meme running by having the donation entry on all my blog posts so that I can make steady donations. (knock on wood)

4. Any other ideas guys?

I’m going to have all the donation stuff lined up when TailRank goes public (hopefully soon). This way if it has the usual splash of a new product release all the traffic can easily be monetized.

All and all it was a fun experiment. Hopefully I can make a steady stream of donations from here on out. Maybe on Monday morning I’ll get a few more links and more traffic.

The biggest change I would make next time is to release it during business hours. I picked the worst timing – Friday at 11PM was not a good idea! I guess the party atmosphere at the TechCrunch BBQ is to blame.