My Blog’s in Woman’s World – How Unexpected!

I’m about to reveal to you the most unexpected form of blog traffic I’ve every received.

About 3 weeks ago I blogged about Incredibly Unexpected Internet Connections, and I eluded to a post to come about an unexpected form of traffic to one of my blogs. Unfortunately I got the publish date wrong and it took a week longer for the issue to come out so I could post this news. Check this out:

If you live in the US, if you go to nearly any drugstore or supermarket in the country you will see “Woman’s World” with the tabloids at the checkout counter. Yesterday (the 23rd) the June 30th, 2008 issue hit the stands – and if you turn to page #35, you’ll find a quote from me with a link to my geek tech blog The Smorgasbord.

Here’s a scan of the section of that page I’m on:

So, I’ve gotten national promotion for one of my blogs for free, and the publication I’m featured in has 12 Million weekly readers. How did I do this? I can’t take the credit really, because it’s not like I solicited the plug. I was contacted through my blog by Woman’s World and asked if they could do a phone interview with me about cell phones since I write about tech gadgets (and often phones). I was more than happy to oblige. I did the interview without knowing if I would get anything in return at all, let alone a link in the magazine for my blog. I’m very happy about this, and while I don’t expect it to make me famous or a millionaire overnight – it’s good exposure and only good things can come of it.

While opportunities don’t come along like this every day – my advice to you would be, make sure you have a working contact form (test it yourself), and be sure to personally answer every inquiry that comes through. When following up, don’t book a judge by it’s cover because you never know what even simple requests for info could lead to.

So, with 12 Million readers – how much new traffic will my blog get? I don’t know, that’s hard to say how a print magazine will translated to the web. The good news is, if they actually took the time to write down the URL and type it into a browser when they got back to the computer they must be interested in the content, so they may be more of a captive reader than someone coming through a search engine. In the last 24 hours, my traffic has doubled, and I assume it will increase throughout the week as more people read – especially towards the weekend. It will be very interesting to see how busy it gets.

What’s the most unexpected form of traffic you ever received to one of your web sites or blogs?