One of the best ways to increase traffic to your website is to offer something for free. If you can marry this together with an announcement on television, you can guarantee that your Internet traffic will spike, creating more new visitors and hopefully new repeat users for your website.
However, if you do run a campaign offering something for free from your website, you need to make sure that your website, and your website’s hosting company, are prepared for it. The influx of visitors could come as such a shock to your website that it causes huge problems, possibly even causing your website to crash.
That’s just what happened to the Soccer A.M. website this weekend. Helen Chamberlain, one of the presenters on the Sky Sports football show, announced that studio guests ‘The Stereophonics’ had a new album out on Monday, today, and that as a gift for their fans, their new single could be downloaded from the Soccer A.M. website free of charge on the Saturday.
Predictably this caused a swath of traffic headed for the Soccer A.M. website looking to download the single, which was available free for one day only. It was only a matter of minutes before Chamberlain was forced to announce that the Soccer A.M. website wasn’t working because of all of the traffic.
They simply weren’t prepared for the extra volume on the server, causing the website to crash. Before running a similar promotion it’s always a good idea to check with your host or IT department that your website can withstand an influx of traffic, otherwise you could find your promotion being very costly to your business.
