Booster shot Vogue Knitting linked to a post about knitted shoes on my knitting blog this morning. VK is the biggest-selling knitting magazine in the world (English-language at least — there may be one in another language with a higher circulation) and has 70,000 likes on Facebook, so this is big.→[More:]

I have gotten a high-profile link before, on Instapundit, but that was to a post on knitting tattoos and very few of those who clicked through had any lasting interest in a knitting blog, so it was just a one-time spike. This link is being seen by my target audience: people who knit and who read about knitting on the net, so though it will reach a smaller audience it will be of much more value to me.

The Knitting Needle and the Damage Done has gotten over a thousand visitors so far today (and the day is far from over), compared to 66 visitors yesterday, and something like 16 more likes on its Facebook page.

It'll be interesting to see how much my daily traffic has grown once I'm past the initial spike. I've been so childishly pleased by the whole thing I've hardly done anything today but write another couple of posts and watch the counter on my site go up. And up. And up.

I mean, when you first launch a site, building the kind of readership you need is a slow, thankless business. You soldier on, posting day after day and posting links on your Facebook page and Twitter, and very few people are responding, and so you hope for a breakthrough like this, and then it suddenly comes.