I’ve seen (and written) a lot of posts about how to get posts picked up by social bookmarking sites and what to do when it happens, but one of the things that has struck me recently is that another opportunity often presents itself when a site like Digg links links to a post you’ve written.
Let me use a recent example to illustrate.
Yesterday I posted a post in anticipation of 4th of July celebrations on how to photograph fireworks which was fortunate enough to get picked up by LifeHacker and as a result was Dugg heavily (or maybe it was the other way around – update – it then got BoingBoing’d – what a day – even with a large server allowance I almost went over! It might be time to upgrade that if I have any more days like this).
The most obvious benefit of this was the traffic that followed from Digg (7000 visitors in the first hour alone) as well as the secondary linkups that came as digg users blogged about the post also. It was a nice thing to wake up to.
But as I looked over the comments on the digg thread linking to my post I was reminded of another benefit of having a post exposed to tens of thousands of people. While digg users can be pretty harsh when they don’t like a post there is also an incredibly wealth of knowledge among them.
Amidst the 10,000+ people who viewed my post today – a certain percentage of them know a thing or two about photographing fireworks and a certain percentage of those people left comments on the digg post with their own suggestions, often with points that I hadn’t included on my original post.
This happens every time I’ve had a story high on digg and what I’m doing these days is to include the suggestions and tips of digg users as an update to my original posts.
You’ll see now on my fireworks post that I’ve got an ‘update’ on it with a series of quotes from digg users and a link back to the thread so that people can see who wrote them.
In doing this I not only enjoy the traffic from digg but improve the quality of the posts that I’ve written – which after-all is the ultimate goal of my blog.
I saw your story on Digg today Darren, very smart timing and well done.
love the article, saw it from my digg. Anyone notice Digg is just on big forum.
If your blog gets too many hits and if it goes offline, try to use http://www.duggmirror.com/
I just got dugg yesterday and have received about 20,000 uniques in 3 days as a result. 1504 diggs and counting! ;)
http://digg.com/videos_comedy/Amazing_Video_of_a_Cat_Climbing_Into_a_Glass_Bottle
What I am wondering is how many people visited your page from netscape, since I put it on netscape a day and a half before it was on Digg. Anyway I know Netscape is still in beta, so you might not have gotten a ton of hits. Don’t believe me check out this link.
http://art.beta.netscape.com/story/2006/06/27/how-to-photograph-fireworks/
Shane I didn’t notice any traffic from netscape to that post – but thanks for putting it on.
btw – netscape is down for me at the moment – I’ve had lots of issues trying to log into it over the last few days.
I just wish they would open up a bit more categories soon. Or at least more sub categories.
Man, you guys make getting Dugg look easy. :(
Very impressive stat. Sites like Digg given bloggers the best channel to promote their works. Of course, the writing has to be very good.
Razib: Well, not just good writing, you have to kinda write stuff that’s more tailored to their tastes, I guess.
I recently got dugg and I had a small factual error in my post. About 20 people sent me an email informing me of my error and I quickly fixed it :D
It’s like having 10,000 editors on your site.
[…] When you have added a few starter articles, try to come up with an article that could generate a lot of attention/traffic. This is tough and is a hit and miss thing…so you’ll have to use trial and error till you get the feel of it. Again, Darren provides another article on this subject. […]
It’s my dream to be Dugg. But I guess I’d better work on broadening my network of readers from a handful to a ton.
[…] Using Digg to Improve Your Content […]