Every marketer or website owners dreams of that traffic spike. Crashing servers, thousands of unique visitors per hour. The Digg Effect. The TechCrunch Effect. Call it what you want, but powerful sources have ways of driving enormous amounts of traffic to your website within a short period of time. Many websites are not prepared for such amounts of traffic not only because they can’t scale, but also because they are not setup to foster repeat visits. The traffic will hit a spike within hours of the initial posting, and only decline for weeks, even months, until it stabilizes and continues along its pattern of organic growth. Web properties vulnerable to these social media spikes, generally blogs, online startups, or social media websites themselves, should be properly setup to take advantage of traffic influxes.
When I was 16 (2004), my then online ecommerce store PurFiveAudio received a near traffic influx. It was a Sunday night and a media representative from Good Morning America contacted me and conducted a quick phone interview about teen entrepreneurship and inquired about my online store. The correspondent told me to brace for large amounts of traffic-the show wanted to do a live interview with me at 6AM the following morning via their San Francisco affiliate. After hanging up the phone I quickly called my web host, LunarPages, and told them of the possibly increase in traffic. Such web hosts who cram thousands of clients onto a single server have no way of managing traffic spikes, and after my tip of possibly server overload, the technician was helpless other than suggest I upgrade to a dedicated server. A grid-based server, such as MediaTemple’s (which I now use and highly recommend) is setup to handle traffic spikes and spread server loads over multiple computers. Although the technology is still new and is maturing, it is well worth the drawbacks. Having a grid-based host braces your website for high server loads, and avoids the unthinkable downtown when you often need it most: a Digg front page, a TechCrunch article, or other heavily populated blogs. Not being able to catch these new viewers is detrimental and mirrors or caches are not adequate substitutes and only hinder any concentrated readership or user growth.
After being technologically prepared for a traffic influx, the next step is to harness the spike by keeping the bounce rate low by encouraging these visitors to explore other pages on your website, and to capture these visitors and get them to return. If you have a blog, implementing the following techniques will give you a better chance of capturing a visitor:
- Use the similar post plug-in for Wordpress. This is known to decrease the bounce rate 10-12% overnight, and your one hit post can double or even triple page views. Demonstrating value on more than one page on your website helps justify a repeat visit, and will increase the chances a visitor will bookmark or subscribe to your blog.
- Use FeedBurner for RSS subscriptions. It’s the most popular and powerful way to push your RSS feed to visitors, and is the easiest to use as it has all of the popular subscription links on an external and trusted third-party website.
- Setup your posts for comments. Try to leave your blog posts open for debate, end with a question. You want feedback, community interaction, and engagement. An engaged visitor will return to check on the comments, especially responses to their own comment.
- Allow threaded comments. This is an option in WordPress and if you have a significant amount of commenters, which is likely if you are receiving significant amounts of traffic for a single blog post, it creates a forum-like atmosphere instead of a list of comments which hinders structured discussions. TechCrunch and Engadget have had increased comments after employing such techniques because it encouraged longer, more in-depth discussions instead of one-off comments.
- Encourage word of mouth. If your website already has social media traction and momentum, keep the momentum. After the social media craze, services like ShareThis popped up which allow your visitors to share or save your content to their favorite social media websites. If each visitor shares your website with more than one person (a viral growth coefficient of greater than one), your on your way to exponential growth!
Hopefully these techniques will better brace your website for traffic influxes! Any other tips I left out?
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Here we have learn’t about being technologically prepared for a traffic influx, the next step is to harness the spike
These steps defienately take time and and can appear frustrating dead ends until your site starts gaining traffic. But when you get that traffic spike; its all worth it.
Hey John actually most of these are quick WordPress plugin installations or existing options in your blog admin panel. The part that really takes the time is getting the actual traffic spike!