Targeting Digg/Netscape Traffic

I recently posted something on my forum (with a poll) related to popular news topic, and subsequently sent it to a few social bookmarking sites.
The result was not only some good traffic from them, but the popularity of the topic also landed us on the front page of some search engines- which is our highest referrer, actually.
What I've been trying to figure out is if it is even possible to monetize this traffic in any way.
I did put an Adsense banner up above the poll and received a great deal of clicks for little money, comparatively.
A CJ banner for an iPod product resulted in one sale.
A Chitika banner with iPod and mp3 products at the bottom of the long thread received less than 10 clicks.

In essence, around 50,000 "views" has resulted in maybe $20 so far.

Has anyone actually been successful in turning this traffic into anything at all?
I am well aware that the traffic does not come to see and click ads, but the other side of my brain tells me there must be something that can be done with traffic that is highly *un-targeted*?

Thanks for any and all thoughtful responses.

 

Not really.....I've seen several site get tons of traffic from DIGG, with no real results. We got about 13k hits from them. All it did was waste bandwidth

 

how about using popups?

 

Didn't really consider it...but it would need to be only for unregistered viewers.
Then there is the whole issue of which advertising platforms allow their ads to be placed on sites w/pop-ups, etc.........

 

I hit the front page of DIGG twice - once with my site, and once with my blog.. i think the total amount of $ was $30-$40.
IMHO the back-links and word of mouth are far more valuable than the short surges of traffic.

 

I'll tell ya what is kind of mystifying......
Even though the traffic to ours is not targeted to the specific theme of our site, you would think somebody would be interested in the actual theme and maybe register a username and post elsewhere on the site?
Not a single one.

Say it is about Blue Widgets.
Wouldn't you think that of all those visitors, A FEW would be huge fans of Blue Widgets and join in the discussions?

Goes to show what "targeted traffic" is all about, and how many people have made costly mistakes over the years, just for the sake of hits.

 

Digg traffic is extremely fickle

 

One of my page just got to the front page yesterday with hundreds of digg and 500 users came online at the same time.It was a nightmare for the server.

I got 7 backlinks so far.I hope there will be more and to my expectation,the diggers didnt say any good things about my link.

Hope this will be helpful

 

Contrary to what people say, Digg traffic can be monetized. My best Adense days are Digg days. Though my CTR was very low on days my site was on Digg, the mass amount of traffic resulted in many clicks.

Digg can also be useful for getting the right people to see your site. Because my site was on Digg, USA Today picked it up and I got a high PR backlink from one of their blogs.

Being on Digg is also cool by itself.

Shoutwire.com shouldn't be forgotten either. It can deliver the same amount of traffic as Digg, but over a longer period of time (about a week). Being on Shoutwire.com also puts you on the homepage of Torrentspy.