Serverdome - News for bloggers, advertising observations and traffic building.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Digg.com is the mothership of all the web 2.0 social bookmarking sites and can be a way to reach a huge number of people. In fact, digg is so popular that a story on the main page can get you more than 50.000 visitors in less than 24 hours. From all the social bookmarking/link sharing sites that appeared with web 2.0, Digg has the possibility to direct the most traffic in the shortest amount of time. In fact, traffic can so much that sites crash and go off line shortly after appearing on the main page, coining the term “The Digg effect” when this happens. If you’d like an overview of what happens to your site when you get on the first page of digg i reccomend these two sites: The Digg Effect: A Deconstruction, and The digg effect - a visual analysis.

How it works

Digg users submit stories that appear on the “upcoming” part of Digg. Registered users can vote, or digg, a story if they like it. Stories with many diggs show up on the main page of each category, and the top stories from each category on the site’s main page.

One of the advantages of having a story appear on the main page besides the obvious digg effect is the indirect traffic from blog than link to digg stories and widgets that display the latest stories from the site.

My own experience

During the last week i have been submitting stories to Digg. None of my stories made the first page, in fact none managed more than 5 diggs, but i still received a decent amount of traffic from the search and upcoming pages. Digg accounted for about 15% of my total referral visitors these ten days. Strangely enough, much of the incoming traffic came from their search engine and generally had a lower bounce rate than other pages. This chart shows digg traffic in green compared to traffic from other sites.

Some numbers

September 15 to September 24 traffic from external sources: Referring sites sent a total of 502 visitors via 30 sources
Digg traffic: 77 visitors (15.16% of total refferal traffic)

Keep in mind that this during a ten day period, with minimal work except for submitting the article. It is not a huge boost to overall visits, but submitting to digg is a great way to get your site out there and getting it noticed, even if it never goes anywhere beyond a handful of diggs.

Downsides to Digg traffic
Most people point out that digg traffic is usually single page views, users click on the digg links, quickly scan the page then press the back button to get back to digg. Despite that, the sheer volume of traffic one can get from even a couple of hours on the digg front page is staggering and more than makes up for it.

Using Digg
Signing up for a Digg.com account is instant and allows you to submit your own stories to digg or vote for stories already on the site. Stories you dugg and submitted appear on your profile page. When you are logged in you can use the “Submit New” button to submit a story. Digg automatically checks submitted stories for duplicates before displaying them on the site.

Get your friends to digg your stories
Digg will not penalize you for having your friends sign up and digg your entries, in fact it promotes networks of friends digging up stories. Stories submitted and voted on by your site friends appear on the “Friends’ Activity” after you log in.

Use digg!
Even if you don’t have the time to be an active contributor, the ten seconds it takes to submit a story can help you get traffic for your new blog, even if it never goes anywhere beyond the upcoming stories page. Aiming for hitting the main page on Digg is a noble (and rewarding) goal, but the upcoming pages will also help increase your readership and provide new readers.