How did “Howcomeyouarehere” get so much traffic?

I am puzzled, how come a blog that started just a month ago with little/no original content get so much traffic?

So it is time to do a little investigating.

On his blog, he was quoted to be saying:

will be sharing with you some tips!
On how I increase my blog traffic!
How to make your blog like a brand!

For this Monday,Tuesday and today which is the Wednesday.
I’ve this amount.After having every tips applied.

Here’s the tip

1)Comment on others blog
-Comment on someone blog humorously or make it interesting that visitors of the other blog would want to check out your blog.

2)Social Media Sites
-Submit your posts on Social Media Sites.You are able to get an instant boost of your blog’s traffic

3)Forum
-Posting in forum and advertising your blog in a forum works well as it is a forum with large amount of visitors and it will boost your traffic and do add a signature with your blog url to widen the chance of getting your blog visited by the members of the forum.Some of the forums I would suggest would be Hardwarezone - EDMW , SGCLUB , VR-ZONE , Playpark & STOMP !

4)Blog Directories
-Submit your blog on Blog Directories : Submit your blogs to Technorati, Techmeme, Blogcatalog and other blog directories. Blog directories are also a place where you could submit your blogs and get traffic and when your blog is fairly new to everyone.

5)RSS Feeds
-Syndicate RSS through feedburner.Because it’s the best. Syndicating feeds also results in increasing traffic, as the people who are in list of your feed will come back.

6)Link others.
-Yes,linking of others will definitely helps alot.By linking more people and more people liking you back you will get a higher chance of increasing your blog’s traffic.If you wish me to link you,post a comment :)!

7)Technorati tags
-Tagged every key word in each of your posts.I found that by tagging my post effectively they were getting a lot more attention then their untagged counterparts, and it’s definitely an advantage.

8)PING
-Ping your blog with websites like PING.SG & BLOGEXPLOSION

9)Title tag
-Based on default, Title tags in blogger can only show the first title set in the blog.
It will be hard to increase the blog traffic and Search Engines Optimization, because the keywords appeared would not match the Post title.
Then, how to make the title tags appear as the Post titles?

It is simple. Some steps you have to do:

1. Log in to your Blogger Account.
2. Go to Layout > Edit HTML in your Blogger dashboard.
3. Search (CTRL+F) for this tag:
4. Add this code (Bold) with the following:

Note:Remove the spacebar for tit le.

10)Blog!
-Yes,you do have to blog something interesting that will attract visitors to your blog.Make sure you update your blog at least once every week.Make your blog like an entertainment station :) Jokes,riddles,etc are proven to increase your blog’s traffic.

What is so interesting is point number 3 and 4.

In point 3 where the cloner (lets call him a cloner, he is not a blogger, he copies all his content from other sources with no original input from himself at all) says to post the blog links on forums such as hardwarezone, I promptly went over and did a search for “howcomeyouarehere”. This is what came up:

Someone is already warning us not to visit the howcomeyouarehere blog! There is also some mention about blatantly using the blog to earn money, but lets leave it for the moment.

Next we look at his next tip for increasing blog traffic, point number 4. Submission to blog directories. I think this is something that the cloner did very well.

Ping.sg works by promoting blog entries that has more user clicks (or pongs) to the top 10, and by being the top 10, that blog entry gains even more exposure and hence translate into tonnes of free traffic. This is what howcomeyouarehere did:

Pongs can only be given by registered users on Ping.sg, and it is not uncommon to see that a blog entry can have a dozen of reads but only 1 or 2 pongs. However, howcomeyouarehere’s entries get ponged as soon as they appear, and have almost the same number of pongs and reads. What is more, the first 5 people who pong those entries are the same, in the same exact order.

6 pongs and 4 reads!

It is quite obvious that he had created multiple accounts to ping his own entries. This is how he get so much traffic.

Next, remember the experiment I conducted earlier on Ping.sg, where I posted an entry with the title “Singaporeans only care about sex, and here’s why”. It immediately become the top story on Ping.sg, hence proving my point that Singaporeans only care about sex.

And how is the content in howcomeyouarehere like? All about rapes, penises and testicles. I expect he go to google news everyday to search for those obscene words and just copy and paste whatever latest sex related story he can find. This greatly boasted his traffic too.

Now we know how did howcomeyouarehere get so much traffic. The remaining question is WHY?

The answer is obvious:

Advertisements are meant for allowing products/services to gain more exposure. In this case howcomeyouarehere has trampled on this very fundamental definition of ads by essentially saying,

“Come on sucker, let me earn some $, click on all the ads you can find on my blog.”

Update 130309: The cloner has since removed the pop up alert.

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13 Responses to “How did “Howcomeyouarehere” get so much traffic?”


  1. 1 poofer

    You forgot one more point, those bogus accounts he created were all on the same day, 12 March 2009, few days after he created his main account.

  2. 2 Haro Genki

    Pong ah Pong, i got ponged by clones before too. Remember i got 6 articles on top.

    The admin can find out easily :) To add on, he spammed at stomp, sgclub and alot of forums too.

  3. 3 beaucoupfish

    Excellent expose!

  4. 4 Photosophize

    Cloners just give bloggers a bad name. I seriously think advertiser or marketing company need to think carefully on what sort of blogs do they want their companies/clients to be associated with. No doubt, high-hit rates blogs can reach out to more people, but what do those people really think about your company? A reputable company ad on blogs with mindless content? How would people treat your products/services seriously?

    Go think… Do you want a short term gain or a long term winning strategy…

  5. 5 Kai Lo

    Whoever made that website is a genius. He is obviously building a lot of hype. Why else would the author here blog about this website? The more people talk about it, the more people will visit that website. He is gaining a lot of publicity because everyone is screaming, “HOW ON EARTH IS THIS GUY GETTING SO MUCH TRAFFIC???”, and new viewers get curious so they check out that website.

  6. 6 a_x

    Diligent investigation. I am only glad I managed to capture the screenshot of this ‘howcomeyouarehere’ cheating post with 4 reads & 6 pongs. Haha.

  7. 7 zs

    Interesting study. :) But however way he did it, even if we don’t like how it is done, he managed to pull visitors in. You’re right, Singaporeans seem to be overly attracted to a small little handful of keywords.

  8. 8 Eric Banana

    Wow, good detective work! Hmmm, but I bet there are tons of others who resort to unscrupulous methods to boost their blogs’ popularity. Well, I still believe that if a product is good, people will know it’s good. (Wait, this means my product is not up to par.. sigh~)

  9. 9 who else?

    read it somewhere, wicked also did the same cheat, so what’s new?

  10. 10 Superman

    So nice… my website need about 6 months to have such traffic.

  11. 11 annoymous

    the pot calling the kettle black
    at least his blog have interesting posts.
    weikiat your rl attidude suck like hell

  12. 12 weikiat

    Uh huh?! Ok lor anything you say lor.

    I mean it is like a whoelse@gmail.com and a annoymous@hotmail.com just appear out of nowhere and start calling names.

    What is an “attidude?”

    If you mean “attitude suck”, then it is indeed a “Pot calling kettle black” case here.

    What you are doing is called hit and run. Zoooom…. BANG! ZHAO LIAOZ (translate: run away)!

    You have a Fantastic attitude!

  13. 13 AndyViciousCycle

    hahaha, his blog is all bout sex and he’s trying to have high hit. I oso spammed at forums be4, very easy get over 1000 plus hits if u do tt. Hollyjean advertised on STOMP too. But she’s a chick who talks alot about sex so it’s very easy for her to get male readers to be on her side. But she’s a rather fun blogger.

    Howcomeyouarehere was like me, except I’m better :p lols . Cos he’s english kinda sucks and he isnt much of a writer. He just copy juicy news from STOMP n the new paper and regurgitate it.

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