Traffic Spike

Posted by Hans de Ruiter

The announcement made last weekend regarding the RadeonHD for Amiga OS 4 driver project resulted in a spike in traffic to this website. This spike was triggered simply by mentioning this project on two of the online Amiga forums. Other websites quickly picked up on these links and posted their own links to the project page. As a result, the number of visitors over the next few days dwarfed the average visitors per day for the rest of the month (see the plot below). It has since dropped down, and it remains to be seen if traffic levels will drop all the way down to their original level, or remain slightly higher.

To date, posting links in community websites that relate to the Amiga (which is the main focus of this website) remains the most effective method of drawing in traffic. In this case, traffic spiked due to the posted links explicitly mentioning the topic (i.e., the RadeonHD driver). Previously, I had simply posted a link to this website in the signature attached to the bottom of every post that I make on those community websites.

None of the blogging websites that I signed up to (Technorati, Blogged, and Zimbio)  have proven to be effective at increasing traffic, nor have any of the social networking websites (Digg and Reddit). Technorati proved to be the most effective of these websites, but the resulting traffic has still been close to zero. Zero traffic has come from Blogged, and Zimbio has resulted in one or two visits, which may well have been accidental. Reddit was openly hostile to me posting links to this blog. There has been a small trickle of traffic from Digg, and Digg still looks like it is worth being involved in. However, the traffic from this site is also near zero.

In conclusion, out of all the advice that I have read on the internet regarding increasing internet traffic, the only few that appear to be worth noting are:

• Write content that people want,
• Increase the number of incoming links from other websites,
• Links from community websites related to a website's content can be very effective at increasing traffic, and
• Be prepared to put in a significant amount of effort.

Comments (0) | 14 August 2008