HoogyWeb

Holy bandwidth, Batman! Last month was a record for this humble, personal blog o’ mine. It all started around the 17th of February when some sluggish page loads prompted me to check the load on Hoogyweb’s servers. It turns out the sluggishness was my local connection, but I went on to check the stats.

My jaw dropped.

In less than two days, my blog had burned through five gigabytes of traffic on my blog, which is a lot considering the personal nature of the site.

So, here’s how I did it:

1. Install StumbleUpon buttons

After some investigation, the single most beneficial add on to my Wordpress install was a little plugin called Sociable. If you look on the bottom of this and every other post, you will see “Like this post? Share it,” followed by a line of linked icons. These buttons link to social bookmarking sites. They are WONDERFUL for spreading the word and getting your website noticed. In the words of the author:

Social bookmarking sites allow websurfers to save, catalog, and share interesting pages they find online. The Sociable plugin appends links for your readers to use those sites to the end of each of your blog’s posts, increasing your potential audience.

As a result, some StumbleUpon user discovered this comic strip post, liked it, and left a positive review. This opened the floodgates, the result of which was over 1000 hits per day, and nearly 30,000 visits by the end of the month.

2. Search Engine Optimization.

I’m not sure how much this helped bring about the traffic explosion, but it certainly didn’t hurt. I installed and configured All in One SEO Pack and Google XML Sitemaps. These plugins make it easier for engines like Google or Yahoo to catalogue my pages for search results.

3. Beware of Bandwidth Limits

When the onslaught of page hits comes, it could easily catch you off guard. I switched web hosts in December, and the prior host’s limit was one gigabyte. I NEVER imagined I would need more, but 29,000 views later, I know better. Consequently, my new host gives me unlimited bandwidth.

4. Keep the content fresh.

As you can see from the charts above, the initial spike subsided. While I still have increased traffic as a residual effect, it’s nowhere near the hits from February. But, if I were to publish more often (which I’ll admit I don’t do enough) I’d increase the likelihood of snagging another review, and once again seeing a traffic spike.

5. Give It A “Push” every now and then.

Maybe this is “cheating,” but I will occasionally submit reviews of my own articles to Stumble. In doing so, my hope is to get the traffic ball rolling. That, and a little luck, usually does the job.