Internet Business Blog

Broke is probably the wrong word to use. Hammered would be better!

On the 9th April 2007, I wrote a piece about choosing Ubuntu over Microsoft Vista as a consumer operating system and it was referenced by a number of very popular Linux websites. The following 4 days saw a massive spike of visitors in my web statistics to the tune of over 7GB of bandwidth, over 20,000 visitors, and over 130,000 page views.

They say a picture speaks a thousand words. Well here’s a couple of thousand for you to mull over…

For a couple of days, BlogTopSites had this site ranked number 1 in their marketing and SEO category, the article attracted over 50 Diggs, but didn’t register as even a blip on Alexa (does this mean that not many Linux fans use the Alexa toolbar or that my Alexa button can’t register page visits?).

It’s not hard to see why the topic is so popular. Even the BBC are reporting on it and computer giant, Dell, is to start shipping it as the operating system on their range of Linux computers. This further reinforces that Ubuntu is picking up pace as the consumers choice of Linux.

I know there’s a lot of in-fighting about which particular flavour of Linux is ‘the best’, but I hope those who argue will appreciate that until Ubuntu came along Linux wasn’t as easy to break into. At least I didn’t think so and BBC article author would seem to agree,

For a long time Linux had been considered to be too difficult to use for normal computer users.

The reference to ‘normal’ computer users I find particularly funny! Linux users aren’t normal?

Anyway, things to take away from this experience:

• Having a great webhost is gold. The shared server that my blog lives on handled all of the traffic fine even though I had on average over 100 visitors at any moment over a 4-day period.
• It’s worth considering caching WordPress pages to reduce database queries especially if a post is particularly controversial or covers a very popular topic that many are passionate about.
• Consider ways to monetise large surges of traffic before visitors start pounding on your door! I didn’t do this and I’m still wondering now how I could have monetised all of that free traffic effectively.
• Digg and StumbleUpon can send you a whole heap of traffic in a very short space of time, but be careful not to submit anything that might be considered spam. Some people may still label your contribution as spam anyway. Be aware that there’s no idiot filter on these types of services.

Technorati Tags: Ubuntu, Digg, StumbleUpon, Traffic Generation, Generating Website Traffic