October traffic

Live by the Sarah Palin bikini pics, die by the Sarah Palin bikini pics. That's the moral of October's traffic at The Other McCain -- a healthy 123,837 visitors, nearly 4,000 a day, but no match for the Sarah Palin bikini-driven frenzy of 291K in September.

I reaped the reward of being one of the first bloggers to figure out that "Sarah Palin bikini" was random-Google-traffic gold, filing a post from the smoking lounge at the Denver airport the day after Palin was announced as John McCain's running mate. The market was soon crowded with imitators, but I was the top Google result for a long time, and suddenly people on my blogroll were e-mailing to ask, "Hey, did you link me? I started getting lots of hits from you, but I can't figure out what post you linked."

A thing of beauty may be a joy forever, but Google gold doesn't last. As attacks on Palin mounted, as McCain slumped in polls, and as the prospect of her becoming vice-president consequently faded, the raw curiosity (or oppo-research interest) in scandalous Palin pics declined. And frankly, Republican-leaning bloggers haven't been giving me much linky-love since Oct. 2, when Team Maverick pulled out of Michigan and I called the election over.

Well, OK, one down month out of eight. The general trend is still upwards. October's traffic was 68% higher than August, and if the bikini boost of September caused me to spend less time link-whoring, I didn't completely slack off in October -- 267 posts for the month. That's an average of nearly 9 new items daily, in addition to my writing and blogging at the American Spectator.

So I'm keeping pretty busy, and the post-election analysis ("Hate vs. Hope: Armageddon '08") should drive a lot of traffic. The other day, I had the joy of handing my wife a Google AdSense check -- a small reward for months of work, and mostly thanks to the Barracuda:

UPDATE: Instalanche! That's the way to get November off to a rockin' start!