Growing Your Site

Pro Blogger has a link to a talk given by Digg's Kevin Rose in London. The talk is on how to grow your site to a million unique visitors.



Here were my take aways:

• Keep things simple. More features are not always a good thing. Often they are looking for what they can remove from their site.


• Build and release. Don't think you understand your users. Release new features, see how it works out with the users. Then iterate.

He also had some ideas about building community via Podcasting and parties and such. Not everyone is a Podcaster methinks. Also, it seems like the launch party thing is really only gonna work in Silicon Valley. Probably not a great help if you live in Northern Wyoming, for example.



In regard to other things Digg, I was listening to a 3 week old This Week in Tech pod cast. Kevin stated that with 40 million unique visitors a month Digg has reached the limits of MySQL. They are planning to move their back end to the open source Cassandra database.



I think that is a nice little factoid to know. Once you hit 20 or 30 million uniques, you may have to start weighing your database options.A nice problem to have. :)