When traffic boosts do nothing

In my country there are more blogs and sites that use Digg and other similar networks to promote their articles. In some cases there were some excellent traffic spikes that made them enter the high traffic sites group for few days.

The sad thing is that most of the time the traffic ends up and then you go back to the small visits number with no serious improvements compared to the statistics before the event.

In these cases the traffic boosts do nothing.

Still one can make up for this problem and try to get as much as possible from these events. Here are some ideas that might help you tame the “digg traffic beast” and benefit from all these:

• prepare for the traffic boost. Start with the server. If you manage your server make sure you are prepared for the huge bandwidth that might put down your account due to the so called “digg effect”. Or discuss with your host and be both prepared for an account upgrade as soon as the traffic might kneel your account.
• prepare an article that you know will bring in that traffic. Of course it has to be unique and interesting. Prepare it with care and also make sure you promote it the best you can on digg or a similar site.
• have more excellent articles prepared. You need to realize that people won’t come back if the blog is not interesting enough. You will have traffic, HUGE traffic for few hours or days. You do this in order to get more subscriptions and more repeated visitors. The people who come to see the article promoted on your site need to find some other excellent materials. Otherwise you’re losing all the momentum caused by the traffic spurt.
• work the next days into keeping the people interested. Many of the people who visit from digg for instance WON’T COME BACK. Some of them will though. They need to find each day after the event something interesting to read. Make sure you write at least one good article each day. This way you will gain some repeated visitors and maybe some subscriptions to your RSS feed.
• understand this is “fake” traffic and not make a huge fuss over it. Digg, StumbleUpon and other such projects offer you some page views (sometimes many), but the traffic is not always “natural”. This is why the visitors who really remain on the site are too few. Don’t brag about your traffic to much since it’s artificial, but try to make the most you can from this. Even if you gain 10 visitors more each day from this, then it’s a good movement. Normally this should slightly increase visits afterwards, so it’s just another way to market your site better.

The traffic boost are good. If you play your card right you might get some good link partners for instance (strong ones) or more RSS subscriptions. Be prepared and make all the right choices for your project.

Best of luck