What’s One Digg Worth
November 29th, 2006 by Michael Gray in SEO, Social NetworksIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
Back in October I conducted a little test to see what the value of making it to the homepage of Digg was actually worth, here are the results:<scroll down>
Let’s go over the basics, I bought this URL in September. The first week in October I pushed it viral and it grabbed hold. So Basically I went from 0 to 19,000 visitors in that first week. The traffic has been slowly been trickiling down since then, but it seems to be leveling off at around 300-500 or so visitors a week (the last week in November has only 1 day of data) . It’s too early to expect any reasonable link counts, but Yahoo is reporting 50-ish inbounds. I didn’t place any links or solicit them, they all came from other people putting them in forums, blogs, and other places. One thing you should notice is the Google traffic is on a decline. Google only shows about 35 pages in the index the rest are supplemental, so Google is really looking for a little more inbound link love. However since I really wanted this to be an isolated experiment I haven’t promoted the site since that first week.
So what can you learn from all this, going after and getting involved in social media is definitely worth the effort. However you can’t rely soley on social media for all of your link building efforts, you need to mix in things like directory submissions, some traditional link development, content creation, article distribution, and a few other tactics as well.
Now for the shameless self promotion part of the post, if you’re looking for some help with getting involved with social media or link baiting visit my consulting page for more details.
Lastly if you were someone I showed this site to, don’t go dropping the URL below, send me an email instead, you never know will come by and see it first.
Update: No point digging anymore this one got buried
Sphere It
November 29th, 2006 at 5:53 am
Dugg.
…at 4am laying in a puddle of drool on my laptop.
Very cool isolation of a Digg.
Off to sleep.
November 29th, 2006 at 10:27 am
Are you selling anything on the site? Adsense?
Do you find digg traffic is fairly poor for conversions?
November 29th, 2006 at 10:28 am
Thanks for the insight!
My digg experiment resulted in zero links; however, I still gained some worthwhile insight. I just started the domain I provided about 2 months ago. I provide spread analysis on NFL games and about one month ago (Week 9) I decided to digg the post containing my analysis. That got noticed by Google and I received 300+ organic visitors from Google directly to my post’s URL. So the next week I decided to digg my article again but it seems Google decided to index the URL pointing to digg rather than my site. May not be new information, but I found it interesting because firstly there was less traffic (~200 less visitors) and secondly, my analytics package wasn’t picking up keyword data from the referring Google query. It was just saying it was a referal from digg. I have since decided to stop weekly posting to digg to see what changes.
November 29th, 2006 at 11:03 am
As a whole Digg users don’t like seeing ads and have them blocked, so when in Rome …
November 29th, 2006 at 1:10 pm
I played with digg and other social media a lot in the spring and found pretty much the same thing. Digg is great for a day, but it very quickly wanes. It might score you a few links, but it’s a pretty time-consuming strategy for such a small return.
November 29th, 2006 at 2:47 pm
Sheez Mike, what kinda domain did you buy!? Send me an email with the details
November 29th, 2006 at 4:53 pm
Hmmm… Do I understand you correctly that you sometimes block the display of ads based on the referrer?
If so… That’s new to me and (IMO) a great idea. Some people visit a website in the hope of seeing relevant ads and it’s a big turn off for others.
November 29th, 2006 at 6:17 pm
Yep Dave that’s correct. For example visit this story from the digg page and you’ll see the adbrite ads on the right panel turn off.
November 30th, 2006 at 5:17 am
When one thing stops working efficiently then it is time for another thing better than that to be launched. Also it totally depends on the amount efforts that you personally put to be benefited from sites like digg.
October 19th, 2007 at 9:16 am
I have found the same thing out about Digg. The traffic is short lived, but If used properly could still bring in a burst of sales.
December 4th, 2007 at 10:24 am
Nice analysis, really spot on. Sad to say that some people have taken this a step further and are now operating digg ‘brokerages’ - going rate from what I’ve seen, between 50 cents and a dollar per digg …
December 7th, 2007 at 1:49 am
To be successful on Digg, you have to really get a lot of votes. Interesting article as I had no idea on Digg’s impact. First place I have seen that has actual numbers to show.