A few hours after ShoeMoney put up his Digg button on my recent article about Digg Traffic v/s Google Traffic – A Chitika Analysis Report, the story made it to the front page of Digg — and as expected resulted in a avalanche of traffic and discussion in various blogs. Now that the dust has settled on that, I thought I’d share some observations. One of the central themes in the various comments (both in the blogosphere and the Digg article) was: Oh Digg traffic is so useless and rarely makes me any money. While a lot of experts have good advice on how to deal with this (PronetAdvertising, Problogger, techsoapbox), here are some positive side effects of getting Dugg (Disclaimer: This is based on two days after the Dugg — so I can’t speak much to the long term effects).
Positive Side Effects of Getting Dugg
- Mainstream Media Attention: Within hours of getting Dugg, we got a ton of press inquiries from mainstream media. As Neil Patel observed at Elite Retreat: They dont care much for what shows up on Digg — but they are watching it.
- Subscription Increases: As expected, there was a marked increase in subscriptions to the RSS feed and email notifications.
- Brand Awareness: The story was on the front page of Digg for a couple of hours. Now luckily for us, whoever submitted the story to Digg (not me!) retained the brand name (i.e. Chitika) in the title. Your brand being seen by millions has to count for something.
- Does your server hold up? Personally, this was the most fun. To see the wordpress blog getting hit at 5000 connnections per second and seeing the sysadmin guys trying to optimize things (KeepAlive Off, PHP Caching, etc) in real time. If you run your own blog, you never know when the next big story is going to hit — so it does give a sense of satisfaction to know that your blog will hold up.
So quite to the contrary, it does pay to get Dugg. It just cant be measured in pure dollars — yet! Questions ? Thoughts ? Comment below ..
Posted by Alden DoRosario (alden [at] chitika [dot] com)