I had hopes that my story on the Democracy XSS exploit would make the front page of Digg. I felt it was highly important that people were aware of the problem and the best way to get eyes on the issue was via Digg. I’ve never gone through a massive Digg and expected the story would move quite quickly. Three days later, I’ve got my guesses about how Digg works. Here some thoughts.
- The story was published Friday night, Eastern. Most people are out drinking, clubbing, cooling their heels after a long week of work. Looking back, I realize Friday nights are incredibly poor times for posts that I want to get publicity on.
- 40 people have Dugg the story at this writing (you can vote now right from the entry) but not enough Diggers - that is, I had a bunch of people Digg the article with the hopes of boosting the story profile, but I don’t know enough people who have a high enough profile using Digg to make it matter. I probably need another 40 to make it to the front page at this point. That’s okay though.
- I installed a new plugin, Digg Button, which allows the Digg button to be placed on individual stories that I want Dugg. This seems to have helped in a small way, but many readers simply don’t Digg, it would seem.
- I have not succeeded in getting Kevin Rose to Digg the story.
As usual, I try to milk every entry I have for publicity. Publicity is my bread and butter and I make no bones about it. The more people read my work, the more well known I become. I write about serious issues for the most part and not so much about personal things that most people don’t care about. My entire profile is built on people knowing who I am.
I am not a big Digg person. Sure it brings traffic but most of what I understand about the ‘Digg effect’ is most Digg traffic tends to stop by, read, and move on. They don’t usually go deeper into a site or click ads. Therefore, I have no real tangibile benefit in trying to get Digg traffic. This case was different. I wanted people to know and understand the dangerous situation and perhaps Digg might come through for me yet. At this point, though, probably not. So we move on to other things altogether. :)
Stumble it!
About the Author: Aaron Brazell is the lead editor of Technosailor.com and a social media expert. His passion is to see companies and individuals use the internet and web technologies wisely and effectively to promote their brands and companies. He served as Director of Technology at b5media from 2005-2008 and is currently an independent consultant.
It’s been my experience that traffic from digg.com clicks plenty of ads, maybe a bit below average for my traffic, but the claim that they don’t click ads has been completely unjustified in my experience.
I should also say that once 24 hours have passed, your story is no longer “upcoming” and won’t make the front page no matter how many diggs it gets. That’s all the time you have to make it happen.
When you digg the story can also make a significant difference. From what I can tell, from being on the front page several times, digg traffic is actually highest on Saturday night. Make of that what you will.
Interesting, Michael. Obviously, I’m still learning this stuff.
I just can’t get excited about Digg, at all.
To me they’re the most overrated website on the ‘net.
“To me they’re the most overrated website on the ‘net.”
Not Playboy?!!!
One of my recent front page appearances on digg.com netted me over 100,000 pageviews and several hundred dollars in ad revenue. It’s also a good backlink.
I’d estimate about 75 of those 100,000 are now RSS subscribers.
So while it’s not going to instantly transform your site overnight, if you’re ready for them, you can net some new readers.
There’s a site out there called DiggHelper.com that helps promote your digg articles if you’re looking to generate more traffic from digg. It’s main purpose is to help businesses who use digg.com to promote themselves.
http://digghelper.com
Poor Matt Craven at the Blog Herald got Dugg. And crashed :)
Oops!
(I told you so.)
If you’re prepared for it, then you can monetize that traffic. I spent all summer performance tuning, so as to be able to handle that sort of thing.
But I didn’t give away all my secrets… ;)
Michael, you just kick-started a campaign to tweak my servers. First I have to upgrade MySQL.