Spring has sprung and March is over, change is in the air and a new hosting billing cycle begins. The following article was published in April when my monthly bandwidth allowance was reset back to zero (from 60 GB). Initially, I created this website so I could learn about the web, how to run a website, do a little programming / graphical design / tinker. It pretty much still serves that function. In the beginning I would churn through 300 mb of bandwidth (in a very busy month), but last month I whipped through vastly greater quantities due to social bookmarking and free icons. The rest of this article explains some interesting patterns I observed in web traffic, and concludes with some general things you should consider if you would like more exposure for your website.

One of the things that I find interesting about this whole internet thing is social bookmarking. I wrote the first drafts of a plugin for wordpress called Sociable to help website owners take advantage of social bookmarking. I also have begun to write about how social bookmarking can be used to promote your website (in a good way, not in a shady spammy affiliate way) as well as review various social bookmarking sites. Of course this was when the site was getting only a few thousand visitors a month. I understood the potential of social bookmarking, but I had never seen it first hand. Until the free icons story.

In early March, I published a small table containing links to a few choice opensource icons and iconsets that are available on the www entitled, “Free! Icons for your website or application.” I published the story at exactly 7:16 PM (est) on March 5th. By March 6th at around 8 am, the server was providing that story at a rate of about 2.6 Million bits per second (according to cpannel stats).

March 6 represents the huge spike in traffic.

At 8am the Free Icons story was on the Digg front page, at about 10am my host, asmallorange (ASO), took the site down. It turns out they needed to take the site down for only a few minutes to reconfigure the server to better handle the load and all in all, the site was only down for 10 minutes. When it came back online, ASO had proactively adjusted my htaccess file to pass the load to coral cache (smart!).

Pie is del.icio.us! — Do you digg it?

As of this writing, 2609 people have dugg the story. Looking at my server stats, about 10 percent of visitors from digg actually dugg the story. The story also made it the del.icio.us popular page, as well as to the popular pages of many other social bookmarking sites (e.g. reddit). After the spike in visitors was over, it was very interesting to watch traffic come from all over the place as various websites picked it up. Lifehacker found it newsworthy and over the course of the month the traffic generated from them and del.icio.us was about equal (interesting!).

What is most interesting is that half of all traffic to my server came by way of digg. Unquestionably, this indicates to me that the place to publish your story is digg. Conceptually I understood the digg effect, but until I witnessed the stats from one I didn’t really know what I was talking about.

Again, at 8am maxpower was on the front page of digg and was serving pages at rate of about 2.6 million bits per second. Doing more math than I enjoy (given that 1 megabyte = 8 388 608 bits), maxpower ran through about 1 gb per hour in bandwidth between 7 and 9 am.

Could your hosting company handle 1 GB per hour without complaining? All I know is that my hosting company (asmallorange) did it with aplomb. After the initial wave of visitors subsided, the overall level of traffic this website now observes on a daily basis is roughly four times more than before it was featured on digg.

Than has directly translated into more comments and participation by people on this website, who in turn mention maxpower in their writings, even further increasing my exposure, and so on. Further, my “earnings” from using google AdSense have also increased. AdSense doesn’t like it when you talk about earnings, but I can tell you, the loyal reader, that I can now retire a whole two days earlier.

Conclusions:

From these observations I must conclude that digg is the most important social bookmarking site on the internet. All other social bookmarking websites ‘featured’ my icon piece, yet digg vastly outpaced them. That isn’t to say that if you own a niche site and there is a corresponding niche social bookmarking site you shouldn’t target it, rather, Digg is the best of the general social bookmarking sites.

Quite simply, if you own a website and you would like to have increased exposure

1. Write quality content;
2. Provide a link to digg;
3. Ensure you have a quality webhost (a front page article on digg can chew through about a GB of bandwidth per hour during ‘high’ traffic times);
4. Make sure your website is optimized for performance. This is the subject of my next work (specifically for wordpress I will explain how to reducing DB queries and use cached pages and the coral cache.

Summary:

• Traffic in March is up over February by about 90%
• Traffic is up due to availability of Social Bookmarking
• Of all traffic in March, 50% was due to Digg
  • Digg is the most important social bookmarking site on the internet

Now I ask myself, why do I provide all these social bookmarking links on my pages if digg is the only one that counts? I can’t think of a reason not to yet — I’m sure someone could provide one… ?

Subscribe to MaxPower