How to Use Digg to Get Traffic

I learn something new every day. Little did I know, being the trailing-edge blogger that I am, that Digg is so powerful. I’ve focused on links and Technorati, but there’s a parallel universe of traffic and Digg.

Here’s a good example. This is my traffic log for the first few weeks of September. The spike of 37,366 page views on September 8th is purely because a blog posting appeared on the home page of Digg.

The guy who removed the scales from my eyes about the power of Digg is Neil Patel. He’s written a very informative post called “Using Digg and Netscape to get traffic”; you should read it if you care about traffic. He writes lots of good stuff about blog and site optimization, so consider subscribing to his RSS feed by clicking here.

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Comments

[Innovation Zen]

do you guys think netscape will be able to outplace digg in the long run by paying story posters?

[Milo Riano]

I agree with Brian that Digg is controlled by very few people. So many times I am the first one to post about a newly launched product complete with features, guides and recommendations and suddenly someone just posts a link to where you download the products and gets digged a thousand times making it to Digg homepage. And worst you get comments from those few people saying that people should digg the other link. It's pretty annoying...

[Paul]

Yes... Digg works really well to generate traffic to a blog. Sometime again I created a post to give our free domains, I created a Digg entry to advertise it abit. Inbound traffic from Digg alone accounts for 10 fold the normal traffic I'm getting daily.

I just hope it doesn't become a link dump, I guess they keep their best digg and deactive those less popular ones. :P

[Brian Duffy]

I find Digg to be kinda of scummy, actually. They make an effort to portray themselves as some sort of democratic institution, but in reality Digg is corrupt and controlled by a relatively small number of people.

Slashdot has long been accused of "Slashvertising", but at least /. is focused on making their site a focal point. You visit Slashdot to visit Slashdot. Digg is just an unprofessional, carnival version of what Yahoo was doing in 1996.

I've observed several websites over the years that have attempted to use public moderation or selection... and in almost every case a cabal of users or the site owners in the guise of "troll" users abused the site in a nefarious way to generate money from someone. (or just to exert power)

[Daniel CerVentus]

The beauty of it all is there is Slashdot, Reddit and Netscape, most of these info/news are the same from site to sites. These sites are like a huge echo chamber. So when news get digg to the front page, it will be usually picked up by netscape and the others vice versa.

Personally, I like netscape now because there is a wider range of interesting stories.

Guy, maybe you should try to be the guy with the most digg on his blog instead of technorati #1.

[Martin Henk]

John and Aaron and others: I found this blog some time ago from Digg and started reading it every day. So it's not totally hopless :)

[Brajeshwar]

Sometimes, it is enough without be dugg to the front page. There are still lots of people who read news, articles on digg that never made it to the front page. If the article, news is good enough, it sure does gets a good traffic to the site though not near the one that gets dugg.

[Doug Karr]

I wrote about the Digg Effect on my blog:
Part I - The Digg Effect
Part II - Conclusion

Digg can be appropriately utilized as an acquisition tool for visitors. However, I think it's important that the content being 'Dugg' must match your site's strategy... otherwise the visits will come and go. Digg may get them, but content still keeps them!

Regards,
Doug

[rags]

Looking at the numbers after the spike, they all fell back to normal levels. That probably is an issue when you get click throughs from a "news aggregator". There just are too many things to read. While a link may be click worthy, the site isn't subscribe-worthy. May be people think that if every article is of value it will show up again in the Digg home page.

[Hadley Stern]

Apple Matters has been on Digg page one around a dozen times (once we had two stories on the home page at once, how surreal!). There is no doubt it has a huge affect on traffic, bigger than being slash-dotted. As for netscape some of our stories have shown up there but it has never been a traffic driver, not sure why (although no story was on netscape page 1 to be fair).

The conversion question is absolutely another topic, but it is an interesting one.

[Tom Kelly]

BTW, Guy- your decision to put the newest comment on top of the heap instead of the bottom is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[Tom Kelly]

I'm turning into a Digg conspiracy theorist. The process of front paging articles is highly suspect. I'm thinking that the best way to get traffic at Digg is to know one of the handful of people that probably hand select the stories that are promoted. The evidence is starting to suggest that there is no algorithm- just a person on watch who arbitrarily decides what to promote.

[Neil Patel]

Michael, RSS stats usually increase after a digg.

Chris, the reason we did not put 20 icons on the bottom of each post is because it gives users too many options. If you focus users on digg and del.icio.us the other social mediums usually follow in.

Todor, you are right about the conversion rate. Digg does not convert well.

Sean, my traffic did not increase too much because of the link. So far it has sent around 200 extra visits. My blog gets around 100,000 unique visitors per month.

[Michael Phipps]

I agree with the spike comment - even though you got stacks of traffic by being dugg, the content that diggers found may not have compelling enough to help you very much at all.

I would be more interested in the after affect of being dugg, in the days following the digg - the conversion factor everyone else is talking about.

Diggers are very tech savy compared with regular internet users. If anyone did find your site interesting, they probably didn't bookmark you - more likely they added your rss feed to their reader. Do you have separate stats on the number of people who access your feed?

Did your email signups increase on that day?

I think to get maximum out of being dugg, you need to move your feeds and leads right up, practically at the top of the right hand column.

The power of digg traffic is enormous - but if you can't turn it to your advantage, by capturing signups to newsletters, or by getting added to feed readers, you are just wasting bandwidth.

[Andy]

I came here for the first time on September 8th too but I've never been to digg. Amanda Congdon had a link on her old blog on that day also.

[Chris]

Guy, I notice that your post footer contains links to Digg and Delicious only. Did you make a conscious decision to exclude similar links such as Reddit?

Many blogs have 20 different social bookmarking icons on every page; I've been wondering whether it makes more sense to list them all, or mention only the most popular.

[Todor]

You all guys are right regarding Digg, but the headline of Guy's article is "How to use Digg to create traffic", not "How to use Digg to create conversion".

Well, traffic could be created via Digg and it's a fact. What will be the long term effect in terms of sales, CTR and other conversion rates is another story. It is up to every site owner to decide how exactly to convert the big traffic into something valuable.

May be in a second post you could advice on conversion, Guy.

[Aaron Brazell]

+1 John

Digg traffic, while great for numbers, doesn't tend to convert very well on longterm readers, ad conversion or deeper traffic. Digg users are pretty fickle and, though I'll never turn down a Dugg story, would prefer to focus on back links and Technorati myself.

[Sean Tierney]

I would be interested to see the "Kawasaki-effect" on Neil's traffic stats after this post ;-)

sean

[Creative One]

Sometime I just get so dumb founded it of how much money company like google and yahoo makes. Without mass production of anything(hardware) they are able to bring in billions of dollars. So if I can gather a mass of people in one place. Am I guarantee to be rich or there are more hidden concepts that I have to understand.