250,000 Visitors From Digg. Was it Worth it? (see screenshot)

I've been pretty successful on digg for about a year now and I've probably had about 250,000 unique visitors from from digg in that time (if not more) - not to mention the extra links and bonus search engine traffic I get.

The key to doing well on digg has been quality, unique & topical content that the digg audience loves. Just take a look at what makes the front page frequently to get a good idea about the topic.

I've attatched an Awstats Screenshot from one of my sites for october.

But the question is - is Digg traffic worth it?

Was Digg's Traffic Lower Quality?
Yes My CTR on Ads is a 5th of normal traffic.

Did it Burn More Bandwidth Than Make Money?
No. They still click Ads, or I still get paid by ads that pay on a CPM basis - and it gives a nice bump to the site's earnings - more than pays for any bandwidth/hosting costs.

Does the site go down when it hits the digg front page?
Yeah it did. But I spoke with my host and they put me on a better server. I also use wp-cache on my wordpress sites - as it is normally pulling loads of MySQL queries what kills the site - caching solves that problem.

My sites now cope fine.

Do the site get a viral explosion after hitting the digg frontpage
Yeah - but it varies each time. Sometimes the effect is minimimal, other times the post gets picked up by other social bookmarking sites, other blogs etc.

This really helps the SE traffic as all these extra links give the sites a boost in rankings.

What other benefits do you get
Digg users may not click ads very often, but you can normally persuade a few of them to sign up to your mailing list or RSS feed. A front page on digg usually brings some more subscribers.

The extra subscribers, long term traffic from other sites, and improved SE rankings contribute to higher earnings in the long term, so there's more to digg than 24hrs of crazy traffic.

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P.S - I don't accept payments to get you to the digg front page - some people have been asking me that.

 

Not bad! I do think the 'Digg effect' is beneficial in the long run.

 

Definately - the long term benefit definately outweights the short term burst in traffic

 

You can tell better then others. Look at the average pageviews from Digg visitors.
Personally I am up for it, doesn't work for my site. Although for many it works I hear.

 

Thanks for posting this! I have seen a couple case studies on the effects of DIGG, and the majority have discovered large boosts of initial traffic, but the cool part is the sustainability even after the first few weeks. (I agree with Jason!)

 

Yeah but are those traffic profitable?

I mean doesn't it take a lot of work to
get on the front page?

I just don't think is worth the time and
effort.

Congrat though!

 

there is a new plugin to help with the digg effect for wordpress. check out my blog

 

good job
I've yet to hit the front page of digg

 

You should generally be creating linkbait articles for your site anyway - submitting it to digg is the easy part.

 

Digg is top 3 highest traffic contributor to my new site.

1. digital point - 40%
2. stumbleupon - 15%
3. digg - 13%
4. Technorati - around 8%
5. Others

I don't have any search engine result yet because my site is just a less month old and it is not yet properly ranked.

 

Congrats on that... Seems like you get tons of traffic from Google, Stumble, Live and Yahoo... Keep it up!

 

I guess his site is older....

 

Nice info shared, Last week I finally hit the Digg homepage & the number of users that it brought to my site was really amazing. Once u hit, you can really expect lot of back links also.

 

not to go off topic but i have been submitting articles to reddit and that is brining in a huge amount of traffic as well.

 

I can't find a way to hit the front page of digg. I will go after Paris Hilton at last

 

A little bit offtopic, but what other programs such as digg do you know ? Can you share them here or by PM, thanks.

 

Great job, so far my experience with Digg has been the same. It is 10x more popular then stumbleupon and all the other social networking sites are not even close. By far the best one to use.

 

That's a great point - using other sites like reddit, slashdot, and propeller can bring in decent traffic too!

 

the traffic from the like of digg and others is good for links back and alexa ranking. the sales side is useless unless you have the right product.

 

For direct sales this is true. BUT:
Digg can be effective to bring in leads - which eventually convert to sales.

Here's a good example:
http://digg.com/tech_news/101_Ways_to_use_Google_s_New_Website_Optimizer