one digital life

You Digg Me… You Really Digg Me

Tuesday, March 21st, 2006

A little over a week ago I announced that I had changed my RSS feed over to FeedBurner, so I would have the ability to keep track of how many people subscribe. An added benefit to FeedBurner, was a feature they call FeedFlare. FeedFlare basically gives you some pre-built items to add into you feed, and your blog posts. That’s what generates those links at the bottom of each post, for emailing the story, digging the story (digg.com), adding to Del.iciou.us, etc… I wanted to make it easy for people to share my stories, so I decided to take advantage of that feature.

Now, I had never actually used digg.com or Del.iciou.us, so I really didn’t know what those buttons did, exactly. So, I decided to do a little experiment. The expirement was meant to show me what the buttons did, and determine if someone could boost traffic to their site by using those other sites. The only thing I can say now is… Oh… My… God!

Here’s what happened… Yesterday I opened accounts over at digg.com and Del.iciou.us (both free). I then gathered up a handful of my past stories that I thought people would be interested in, and bookmarked them in Del.iciou.us, and dugg them (digg.com). Most of the stories had a mediocre response, less than 10 diggs each. But, there was one story that got a little more attention. It was a tutorial I wrote last year, on how to back up you music library using iTunes, and automatically track future incremental backups.

As of 8:00pm tonight (PST) the story has received over 1,500 diggs. My site, which usually gets around 3,500 visits per day, has received over 16,000 visits today. The traffic hit its peak at 11:00am, receiving almost a days worth of visits in one hour. Yesterday, there were 286 people subscribing to my RSS feed, as of right now, there are over 1,000 subscribers. My referrer log has been overflowing with links from digg, Del.iciou.us, Yahoo News?, PopURLs, and a bazillion other online news readers, RSS aggregators, and blogs that picked up the post.

Now you see why I said… Oh… My… God! It was an amazing day. I’ve read about this happening to people, but it’s the first time I’ve gone through it. It was a bit freaky to see the numbers change as fast as they were today.

I’m going to say that this experiment was a success. I learned what the buttons did, and determined that, yes… you can increase your traffic by using sites like digg.com, and Del.iciou.us.

I’ve also read that after an event like this, you typically don’t retain all those readers. A lot of them will drop off… and that’s OK. But, I wanted to extend a welcome to any new readers out there. I hope you enjoy the site, and stick around for a while. Thanks for an exhilarating day!

8 Comments to You Digg Me… You Really Digg Me

1. Congratulations! It’s really exciting your site’s traffic has increased so much. I’ve subscribed to your feed for a while now and have been reading your posts everyday (or whenever you update) and I’m glad the world has gotten a chance to find your site and enjoy your interesting or helpful or cool or humorous posts, too! Hurray!
Alice on March 21st, 2006

2. Thanks, Alice. I appreciate that :)
paul on March 22nd, 2006

3. I realize this is really a post about Digg and your content, but it’s very cool to see such a compelling example of the power of FeedFlare. The chart says it all! Great job.
Dick Costolo on March 22nd, 2006

4. [...] I guess it is a small world after all. About two months ago I created a FeedFlare to make it easier to post your articles to digg. Wouldn’t you know it, I’m surfing the web a few days ago, minding my own business, and I see that not only is someone else actually using this FeedFlare, but posting the item to digg caused a huge traffic spike to his web site! As John ‘Hannibal’ Smith used to say, “I love it when a plan comes together.” [...]
Arbited » FeedFlare for Feed Circulation on March 24th, 2006

5. Very cool that you’re seeing positive effects from FeedFlare, however I’ve found that FeedFlare’s support for non-RSS entries is limited (if existant at all). As simple as the service makes it to add links to your pages, it won’t add them to order archives.
Alex Moundalexis on April 11th, 2006

6. Congratulations! I regularly visit Digg.com and Del.icio.us (I watch them through an RSS aggregator, Bloglines.com) and I know the power of those websites. A lot of sites are posted and suffer what is called the digg effect (basically the websites shut down for a while). I have seen a lot of blogs on there that I have subscribed to as a direct result of being on digg.com. Congrats again and I hope you have some more success with your articles.

   Pete
acedanger on April 12th, 2006

7. I Like guys like You that give away wisdom cool and relaxed. With this kind of information many people can save a lot of money. Me Too. At the moment i try to work with feedburner on my site: your news are good news. thanks.
zec on November 20th, 2006

8. [...] that not only is someone else actually using this FeedFlare, but posting the item to digg caused a huge traffic spike to his web site! As John ‘Hannibal’ Smith used to say, “I love it when a plan comes [...]
FeedFlare for Feed Circulation « Serious tech stuff on November 29th, 2007

Leave a comment