How Smash Notes Accidentally Became #5 Hit On Google.

One day I opened Smash Notes analytics to find out that people were looking for 'porno' and landing on this site, but why? We don't have any videos, not even pictures for the most part, why would someone come here instead of a thousand other places they would rather be? I got curious, and dug in. Turns out, as my friends pointed out, there was a very popular podcast called My Dad Wrote a Porno, and although I had forgotten all about it, we did make notes at a request of one of our followers. The podcast got started by Jamie Morton, whose father wrote the script for his porno called "Belinda Blinked 1," and although a rather unusual occurrence, Jamie did not mind his dad as a budding novelist. In fact, he seemed rather proud. Here is a segment from Jamie, talking about his dad's creation. Jamie's podcast was hysterical. Each episode included a chapter from the Belinda Blumenthal series, and along with his friends James Cooper and Alice Levine discussing the plot, the characters, and "science" behind this gem. Thanks to his dad's writing skills, My Dad Wrote A Porno (MDWAP) has a strong audience with 100K followers on twitter, their own subreddit, and an HBO show with the same name. How incredible? My Dad Wrote A Porno is a great example of how a simple podcast could blow out of the water and become a legend. But what about Smash Notes? Was getting all this crazy porno traffic any good for the website? Short answer is this — What Google brings, Googles takes away. Getting search results for a porno podcast was all fun and games. I had just finished writing a blog post about hitting 15,000 new visitors, as the number was already climbing past 20k. It was the first time in a long while where Google Analytics was my front page. But did it work, was this traffic actually any good? Here are my stats from the Google Analytics and Webmaster console; the answer is both yes, and no.

Smash Notes accidentally becomes #5 hit on Google

As you can see, 97.95% of the MDWAP visitors were first time Smash Notes users, 87% of them bounced, and the average session duration for their visit was about 1 minute 29 seconds, dropping to 30s as traffic exploded. On one hand, this meant that if 10,000 users landed on this podcast, less than 1k of them even considered exploring other episodes, and that's not what I was hoping for. On the one hand, that is 1k listeners who got to explore, and 9k listeners who got exactly what they came for. That's pretty good! My own podcast that week got a spike in downloads, and the newsletter got a small number of new subscribers, but in general, the conversion was not very significant. Time will tell if this accidental win had any long-term affect on the business. People who were looking for value, they seemed to have found it. For everyone else, let's face it, there was nothing to see. If you would like to hear a hilarious podcast like no other, take a look at the My Dad Wrote a Porno, Season 1, Episode 1. You just might laugh so hard, you subscribe to the newsletter to get more awesome updates like this. 👇 Best, Kirill.