Many companies come to me and ask for help with bookmarking and voting regarding their blog posts. What they’re talking about is the Digg Effect – or any site that causes your page to be viewed as a popular post on a bookmarking site. Other alternatives to Digg are sites such as Reddit and Delicious and StumbleUpon. These sites all increase exposure to a blog post and to your website. They allow their users to see what content receives the most votes from readers. Whether or not a post gets a lot of attention, or even goes viral, is up to the often fickle opinion of the masses.
The reason people like the Digg Effect is that if a post rises to the top of the popularity scale of the Digg network, it can crush a site’s server under the traffic. This looks great at the end of the month when you can report to your boss that you increased your traffic by 500%, but the reality is, it is difficult to get on that type of run on Digg. Many posts that make the popular cool kids list on Digg have to do with things you would find on CollegeHumor.com or the latest craze in email jokes. You can make the top of the Digg list if you have some information that is an exclusive or a scoop, but for the most part it is more about the cat falling off the keyboard.
The other problem with claiming the accolades of winning the Digg popularity contest and raising your monthly numbers to all time highs and looking like the hero is that if you do not make the Digg list the next month your numbers look like as though they have fallen dramatically – and that you must have done something wrong. It has been found that people reading popular posts on Digg often never return to the site and rarely subscribe to further postings. This gives site owners a false sense of numbers. The other issue is that to get on Digg’s popular postings, you have to continue to challenge the system with new humorous or one of a kind posts, and you find yourself chasing the Digg Effect rather than actually writing good content people might want to read. My advice is to not worry about the Digg Effect, and continue to provide posts containing information and content that will keep regular readers coming back. Let them be your evangelists and not the masses at Digg.
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Tags: Blog Traffic, blogging, Bookmarking, Deliscious, Digg, Popular Blog Posts, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Webite Traffic
Great post and advice!
Thanks Megahn! Digg is a pretty cool tool and application but many put far too much emphasis on those Digg numbers. Thanks for stopping by and keep up your great work!