The power of Digg - my experience.
A couple of years ago I ran a tech blog on mobile phones and related technology. Things started very slowly and, as people are wont to do, we loaded the site with a few banner ads and Google Adsense and then posted a story or two daily for a couple of months and sat back to reap and watched the pennies(!) roll in.
To that point, traffic to the site hadn’t been strong (putting it VERY mildly), and so we began to post some of our better stories to Reddit, StumbleUpon and occasionally to Digg. You know, just to try our luck.
Well, one of our posts hit the home page of Digg one day and sat there for a few hours, one dreary Thursday, and boy, was it fun ride!
Attention started very slowly. We got 20-30 hits to the story, within the first half hour of posting and 3 or 4 Diggs. This seems to happen with almost all stories that are submitted and then they normally get swamped under newer stories, never to see the light of day again. This time it was different. A short while later, we hit double Digg figures, then, somehow, we hit the homepage of Digg and thats when things went nuts.
Statcounter got a hammering from me on that day as I was there refreshing every minute to see what was happening. Every time I hit refresh, sometimes only 20-30 seconds apart, we had had another hundred or two hundred visitors. Diggs would go up very quickly and we hit 100 Diggs within the next hour with a healthy number of comments on Digg too. We slipped off the homepage of Digg probably 20-30 times, but kept on getting brought back on, often hitting the top story slot on the home page! It was an absolute blast and after our 6 hours in the spotlight, we had seen 29,384 visitors to our site which had previously experienced maybe 30-50 uniques on a typical day.
What did this enormous injection of money translate to, money-wise? About $14.82 in Adsense earnings…from almost 30,000 visitors. Not exactly something to write home about, but we did learn some valuable lessons and gained a first-hand appreciation for the power of popular social networking sites IF you can write an interesting story that captures the Digg crowd’s attention.
What did we learn and gain from this?
- Digg is incredibly powerful at generating enormous amounts of traffic in a very short space of time
- Digg users IGNORE Adsense and banner ads (they are too savvy a bunch, and are there for the facts and rarely for the other bits and pieces your site might offer)
- Almost 300 new subscribers to our RSS feed
- Quite a significant number of backlinks to the site - we still get a consistent traffic flow to the site and to that post in particular from MANY other blogs and sites around the Net.
- 853 Diggs in 6 Hours
- Nearly fifteen bucks in revenues
- A big adrenalin buzz…and confirmation that our hosting provider at the time could handle the DIgg effect!
The main benefit of our 15 seconds of fame was of course the exposure, getting backlinks, improved page rank and Alexa score rating. It really gave our site the boost it needed and lifted us a few rungs up the popularity ladder.
So, I can only recommend that you too plug your stories on Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Propeller and any other social networking sites you can get your hands on. You just never know, one day you might get your site in the limelight…
What has been your experience with Digg? Would love to hear from you. Comments, please? Cheers.
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