traffic

how to legally skip traffic queues

It took me 30 minutes exactly just to drive out of college today. IDIOT drivers blocking up yellow boxes and traffic light junctions were to blame. Normally i’m pretty patient but traffic lights had changed green 3 times and we still hadn’t moved… so i ended up driving the whole way around the town just to keep moving… I really hate not moving and being stuck in traffic. Especially when we have manual cars - it’s not relaxing and it’s not comfortable as you’re constantly pushing peddles and changing gears, using handbrake etc… If i had my way, manual cars would be banned

We then come to roundabouts with all the traffic in the left hand lane - like 10 cars deep. I’ll now reveal one of my favorite tricks to legally beat traffic….

We have a roundabout…

Lets say it’s two lanes and the left hand lane is full and the roundabout is busy (rush hour). Even if you want to turn left, move in to the right hand lane. Do a full 360/440 of the roundabout and exit when you want

This also works at traffic lights but it’s a bit more work… for example when i come out of college, generally everyone comes out at the same time and all head in the one direction and use the same lane. The other lanes are virtually empty. So if it’s busy, i’ll move in to one of the other lanes, carry on through the junction and turn at the nearest available space and then head back towards my destination but from another angle

The latter method is riskier as you may not save any time… you’ll need good awareness to know when it’s worthwhile doing and when it’s not. But the first method generally never fails and quite often that boy racer who just overtook you a while back will wonder how the hell you’re back in front of him again

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quick thinking gets traffic

As soon as i heard about Google Chrome being launched i knew it was going to be a success. I also knew it would be hot stuff in news and in Google itself with people wanting more information on it.

So i set about finding domains… chromebrowser.com was taken. Damn. A little investigating pulled up some interesting results. It’s registered to a Google employee in India and was registered in July of this year.

So then i started hunting for chrome related names…

• Chromedownload.com? - Nah doesn’t make for good site, i wanted a site where i could talk about any chrome stuff and the name would reflect that.
• ChromeReview? - well, all i can do is review chrome then or it’s features and that would get boring after a while…
• ChromeGuide.com? - yeah that sounds cool… it leaves me open to write about anything - i’ll take it

So i put up some content, got a theme, customized it a bit and chromeguide.com was alive and kicking. As soon as Chrome was released i downloaded it, and within about 5 minutes i’d made a mini-review of it’s main features. I then submitted the article to stumble and got instant traffic;

139 visits on day 1 (site had only been live for about 8 hours).

179 visits SO FAR on day 2 (with over 12 hours left to run in day 2).

So this is an excellent example of how acting quick pays dividend online. I’ve had success with this in the past both on other sites and this blog. Some of you may remember my eduardo post - that got me tonnes of traffic on this blog as i was quick off the mark - blogging bout the event straight after the match was over and getting indexed pretty much instantly.

I also blogged about henry moving to barcelona as soon as the news broke - that got me some traffic and my ‘staunton sacked‘ article also got me some added traffic as i said Steve Staunton had been sacked days before it was confirmed.

So what now for chromeguide.com - do i sell it while it’s hot? Well, as i’ve said yesterday, my attitude towards flipping sites has changed slightly…. i’m not so trigger happy on the ’sell’ button anymore. Ideally, i’d want sustained traffic over a longer period of time + a few subscribers wouldn’t go amiss.

That will mean of course not only can i not sell chromeguide.com, but i’ll have to keep adding content. Remarkably, despite having backlinks from numerous blogs plus digg and stumble etc… the site still isn’t indexed yet in google. I’ve noticed this of late in google…. it’s getting more and more difficult to index a site right away.

Stats the way i like it!

In January of this year, i published smemon.com’s traffic stats for 2007 - my first full year as a blogger. In 2007, i had 24,607 visits, 41,945 pageviews.

With well over 4 months left in 2008, i’ve already smashed 2007’s stats;

I suppose RSS subscribers are the real acid test of how good a blog is and unfortunately the growth there hasn’t been as sharp, but it has *still* been rising - all be it slowly. I’ve never pushed for more RSS subscribers on this blog, but that’ll be changing soon…

It’s good to be back

As most of you will have noticed, this blog has been down for the past 48 hours or so. I did manage to throw up a few plain html pages just to keep things ticking over.

Anyway, it all came out of the blue… for some reason, my 2 week old article 21 cool webmaster resources hit the spotlight on stumbleupon.com. That then had a knock on effect, which saw the article make it’s way in to del.icio.us and get almost 60 saves there.

For those of you who are wondering what stumbleupon and delicious are, they’re two of the largest social media / bookmarking tools out there, behind digg.

Millions of users, huge communities and tonnes of traffic In 24 hours, the site got as much traffic as it would normally get in 4 months - over 20k unique visits.

Of course i’ll never know the real amount - it was probably closer to 25k unique visits, possibly more, but due to the site being down and my back to basics plain html pages, google analytics was out of action for a good while.

I’ve never experienced that sort of traffic before on ANY of my sites. JPEGr (one of my old sites) touched 1k unique visits in a day, i’ve had this blog hit 700/800 visits a day, but to smash all that with over 20,000 visits is incredible.

Incredible due to the fact it’s a personal blog and the article wasn’t fantastic, but more incredible the fact that the site could handle that sort of traffic on a shared server

I did have wp-supercache enabled and i had optimized the article itself for a digg effect (i shrunk the images down to as small a filesize as i could get them). Apart from that, i didn’t do anything else…

Of course once the site was disabled by my host (understandably), i was forced in to tinkering about with things. First of all, i re-directed all traffic from my 21 cool webmaster resources article to this page. I then thought, well, the whole site is down, so i may as well direct ALL traffic to that page. So if you entered smemon.com you would also arrive at that page.

I did this using a ‘301 redirect’ - what the hell is that? It’s just like diverting a phone call to another number. It’s done using a .htaccess file, just adding one line of code… i’ll dedicate a full post to that later as it’s very useful to know.

So i’m just glad to have things back to normal now… it’s a great experience and has resulted in plenty of exposure for the blog. Although it’s killed short term traffic and RSS subscriptions, i’ve gotten a few backlinks from it, plus i’m sure i’ll have gained more readers - we should see the RSS subscriber count rise steadily over the next week or so…. (currently at 31, normally it’s about 70).

I’m now walking a tightrope with my host - one more strike and i’m out So whatever you do, don’t digg or stumble any of my articles It’s a nice situation to be in though - having a blog so big it needs a new server… next step will be a VPS server - it’ll give me a bit more room to play with. One of them will cost about $40/month.

The blog normally gets about 150 unique visits a day, it has been rising slowly but surely. Although my current shared server can handle that no problem, ’spikes’ are a real problem… a shared server can’t handle spikes in traffic. A VPS would be more flexible.

two great articles coming this week

Normally i don’t write for traffic, but this week, two of my posts will be ‘made for traffic’ posts. It’s not so much the fact i’m desperate for more traffic, it’s just experimenting with what people want and what sort of stuff is of interest to them.

That doesn’t mean the posts will be poor quality or link bait… no… it means the quality will be pretty high, higher than normal. My ‘18 random ideas’ post still sends me more traffic than any other…whilst it’s nice to be getting traffic from that almost year on, it’s not nice to see the one post dominate my daily traffic

That was a ‘made for traffic’ post…. i’ve also had several other ‘made for traffic’ posts flop. Like 50 daily annoyances for instance.

So in a bid to hit the nail on the head once again, i’ll be keeping these posts tech related and hopefully somewhat useful / informative. The reason for the double whammy of ‘made for traffic’ posts is purely experimental.

I also feel my new theme looks much more professional than my old one, so perhaps it could play a role in getting people to stick around longer…

I’ll post some screenshots of traffic, sources and RSS subscriptions towards the end of the week and we’ll see if this ‘deliberate’ approach works…