I was hit with a massive tidal wave of orders

This is unreal. My product (Talking To Toddlers, see signature) has been on the market for about 5 months at ClickBank. Things are going well, momentum is gaining, and order flow has been building. I celebrated a sales milestone over the weekend.

Then yesterday something big happened. I started getting orders literally pouring in almost faster than I could count them. Incredible traffic and sales numbers like I never expected. We're talking well over 1 month of "normal" sales happening over the course of 12 hours.

I was worried because my hosting account probably won't like tens of gigs of bandwidth consumption in a single day. It made me realize that perhaps it is time to play for life beyond shared hosting. But, so far the host has help up incredibly well.

I can't actually tell WHAT happened because the affiliate responsible for all of these sales has not contacted me. I would love to congratulate him/her on a successful campaign. I imagine it was someone with a massive list of interested buyers, because I can't believe this traffic could come from any other method other than email marketing.

Anyway, a few "take aways" from my perspective:

1) Focus on affiliates. I pay 75% commission because I want my product to appear very attractive to affiliates who work hard to promote it. Every sale they bring me is money I would otherwise not have, so being greedy is not necessary nor is it wise.

2) Email marketing lists are incredibly powerful. Whoever owns the list behind this campaign has put a lot of money in his own pocket by promoting my product. Well done.

3) I need to outsource backlink building efforts, and focus my attention on finding people who can be great affiliates to produce regular traffic. The SEO stuff will produce more of my own sales (no commission) but the affiliates diversify my income and don't put me at the mercy of Google

4) Everyone should use an on-exit popup. The size of my email list has massively expanded because of the affiliate traffic I'm getting. If my conversion rate is 2% that still means 98 people exit and leave forever. If I capture 5 of them via email my list grows immensely. See point 2 above, because a list is very valuable. I need to learn more about how to profit from my list by building a relationship with them. I already provide good free info in my autoresponder, but after 8 messages the communication goes dead and they hear nothing from me. I need to learn what to do next to keep the relationship alive.

5) I need to figure out IN ADVANCE what I'll do when I get 2-3x the traffic that this wave brought. I'm sure it will drown my hosting account and I would rather be proactive. Any ideas are very welcomed!

That's it. I just wanted to share my success and what changes in thinking I've had as a result.