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So a few weeks ago I wrote a few posts on Social Bookmarking 101 – Where To Start and Getting Popular on Social Bookmarking Sites 101. You may be interested in checking them out because it works. Last week I had a post go to the front page of Digg by following those tips. I didn’t use any pre-existing lists I just started from scratch so you can do it too.
Here are 5 points you may want to know before doing it yourself:
Hosting
The post was only on the front page for less than 30 minutes as far as I can tell. Here’s what a majority of viewers saw when they clicked the Digg link to my site:
Image may be NSFW.
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In the space of those 30 minutes google analytics tells me that the site had nearly 2,000 views. I am unsure of the number who couldn’t get through because of hosting problems. After researching others is seems that you can expect between 5000 and 150,000 visitors depending on how long it stays on the front page and whether it makes the top 10 stories of the day (always displayed on the right hand side of the page).
If you don’t have the hosting to support making it to the digg front page you will miss out on a lot of traffic and it will very quickly get your page buried (as mine experienced). Even if you get buried you will still get an influx from many different sources on the web.
Quality
There are ways to get more exposure to your page by working with your friends to help get the diggs up. And while I recommend this to get the initial momentum, if you aren’t submitting quality work it won’t take long to get a bad reputation. Also make sure you do a good job of spell checking and editing your post before it gets submitted.
Putting time into creating a masterpiece for submission can be a great idea when aiming to get traffic from digg. Once you establish yourself as a producer of great content the digg the community will happily embrace your future work and you will find it easier (so they say) to get to the front page.
Links
Once a page gets popular on digg not only will it generate significant traffic to your site but it also gets the attention of other resources on the web. As a direct result you will see an influx in traffic from other social bookmarking sites. The following day I had about 400 visitors from Reddit (from the same buried article).
As linkbait it’s great. I did a google search to see how many times my post had turned up. After just one day there were 118 backlinks recognised by google. Great stuff for a buried post.
Adsense
As a rule the more experienced an internet user is the more banner blindness they have. Generally I have been getting a CTR on my adsense of about 1-2% but for the digg traffic I had a CTR of just 0.27%. So if you are trying to get a build adsense revenues by getting digg traffic don’t bother. Either think of a smarter way to monetize traffic or start working on a longer term strategy.
RSS Subscriptions
Of the 2000 visitors there were only 25 new subscribers. So most of the traffic was fleeting. An interesting post to check out is probloggers How to Build a ‘Digg Culture’ on your Blog which covers a few ideas of how to benefit from digg traffic. He also talks about the bump his subscriptions get from digg traffic.
Although most of the digg traffic is short lived, there are many benefits from getting to the front page. Keep working to get there and you will eventually reap the rewards.