The Mini-Digg Effect

Most people are interested in the huge amounts of traffic you get by hitting the first page of Digg. JohnCow.com did a piece recently titled, Digg Made Easy. Sure, 75,000 visitors is pretty nice.

But what happens if nobody else diggs your site? You’re left out there with just a single digg, or maybe two, and what happens?

You’re in luck, because I have the traffic analytics to answer that question!

Recently, as part of my Win Me As A Slave Contest, two of the contestants dugg the contest page. And that was it…apparently nobody on Digg itself thought a blogger giving himself away in (figurative) bondage to promote his blog was digg worthy. Everyone’s so jaded these days!

Anyway, 18 people from Digg clicked through to the contest page when it was on the first page of upcoming news. 1 person clicked through when it was on page 3, 1 from page 8, one from page 11, and one from page 53. 2 clicked through on the Offbeat News page.

Those 2 diggs resulted in a total of 24 unique visitors to the blog. Only a couple of them didn’t bounce immediately (apparently they weren’t actually interested in reading anything…note to self, include a picture next time!) The two that didn’t bounce spent about 12 minutes total on the site and clicked on a couple of other posts.

There you have it. You may not get much traffic from one or two diggs, but you do get some traffic. And a couple of people might actually take the time to read your site!

8 Replies to “The Mini-Digg Effect”

  1. I still received traffic from some articles that I got a couple of diggs from myself. Any little bit helps and who knows, that 1 reader could become a loyal fan and then in return promote your blog on their blog someday. The circle of blogging;)

  2. Good point Lori, any traffic is good. Having trickles coming in through various ways that don’t involve search engines is great, just in case Google decides it doesn’t like your blog one day.

  3. I never really received that much traffic from digg but I digg anyways just so that I feel better when someone checks me out and sees that I have been dugg. Sounds kind of funny but hey, maybe one of these days I will make it to the top page.

  4. Interesting article. I find that, while Digg users may not all flock to my articles, the ones that do are savvy enough to subscribe to my feed. A lot of niche bloggers seem to forget that for every person in the world who know about RSS, there must be a least on of their readers that doesn’t. Digg users are already into that.

    I only really started using Digg to get indexed quickly (and my god it works – 5 mins for a No1 spot today) and if traffic comes too – great!

    Rob

  5. Social bookmarking stuff is a whole new idea to me. However, I see the potential. I got 20 new visitors yesterday, and of those, 2 signed up. That’s a 10% conversion ratio. And if I put up two articles with rates such as yours, I get a new member.

    It may sound like a little, but there is still a pay off. Quality over quantity.

    Sincerely,
    Devin T.

  6. Hi Devin, quality over quantity is the way to go. Traffic alone is meaningless, unless they’re willing to do what you want them to do. I’d rather have low traffic, but most of them be truly interested in my content, than loads of traffic that just doesn’t care.

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