Lets say those 50,000 hits are all local, so they occur in a 8hr period.
That's a whopping 1.73 hits per second. If it's spread over multiple timezones then it's just 0.6 hits per second.
Unless your pages are HUGE, I don't think you have to do much of anything to handle that type of traffic.
Just lower max clients, tune your mysql setup, tune your php setup and you should be fine.
If you happen to grow to 200 times that traffic, perhpas this article will help:
http://www.ewanleith.com/blog/900/10-mi ... -15-server