Digg Effect : The Perfect Example of Mixed Feelings!

  04 Aug 2007 by TipsoSaurus

Those who know me through my blog know this that today my blog was down for about 3 hrs. time and it was because one of post got popular on digg and managed to reach the homepage of digg! A big thank you for all those who dugg the story.

The digg effect did its trick and the blog was down. With the excellent support of my web host, I managed to get it up, however, things did started to look bad when the blog was down. Things got back to normal when finally the story got removed from the homepage.

Here are some of the things which I learned with this incident :


1. Write excellent headlines : Well, that post will be called more like reporting, where I linked to a service which was offering 50,000 + e-books for free. But, the headline (Download 50,000 + E-books : All Legal!) did the trick and I got good number of diggs. That means if you can write some really good headlines then you can stay regularly on Digg homepage. Brian (The copyblogger) has shared a similar experience, and tells us that how important it is to write an excellent headline and the opening paragraph.

2. You need something more than shared hosting : If you are expecting that you’ll reach the digg homepage very often and that you’ve the talent of writing killer headlines (alas, I don’t have that gift) then you’ll need something more than shared hosting. Probably, VPS (Virtual private server) will be the better choice, of course if you are a real pro then dedicated server will be the best. Else you can take some steps which Quadszilla of SEO Black Hat took.

3. Make sure you are ready with some good stories for next days : When you get good traffic then there are many users who subscribe for the RSS feed. So, make sure that you keep some good killer articles which will keep the readers happy and you’ll be able to keep them as the regular readers.

What else do you think you can do to get that digg traffic, you can do to be safe from the digg effect ?

10 Responses so far

  1. Vyoma August 4, 2007 7:36 pm

    Yay. So you got trolled over by Digg. :)

  2. TipsoSaurus August 4, 2007 7:39 pm

    Yes, I got trolled over by digg. However, I did learn something and share it with everyone. :)

  3. Nirmal August 5, 2007 3:00 am

    Good to know that your article got to the front page. Congrats! Nice tips here.

  4. TipsoSaurus August 5, 2007 3:41 am

    Yeah, it is indeed a very cool feeling that you hit the digg homepage, however when the server crashes after that then you don’t know what to feel at that point of time. You are happy because the story reached the homepage of digg and you are sad because the server crashed. That’s why I said that its a perfect example of mixed feelings!

  5. kuanhoong August 5, 2007 10:25 am

    Congrats for making to the front page. Now you made it to Digg, what is your next target?. How about front page of India’s daily newspaper? :D

  6. TipsoSaurus August 5, 2007 9:16 pm

    @ Kuanhoong : Thanks a lot but again as I said that it was really a mixed bag of feeling. Well, I’m actually planning to hit the front page of Times of India and I hope I’ll make it soon. :P

  7. Shankar Ganesh August 6, 2007 3:09 am

    Very informative points there. The first point contributed to the chances of reaching the front page ;) That was an excellent headline.

  8. TipsoSaurus August 6, 2007 4:25 pm

    @ Shankar : Yeah and that’s why it actually made it to the homepage of digg :) I will hope that I’ll be able to write some killer headlines like that in future :)

  9. Benedict Herold August 6, 2007 5:47 pm

    Congrats Mayank!

  10. How to increase the website or blog traffic - Blogging Tips by TipsoSaurus August 13, 2007 8:04 am

    [...] 3. Make use of Social networking & social news networks : Social networking is important in blogging and if you can’t do social networking then it’s a rare chance that you’ll be successful in blogging. Leaving comments and trackbacks is part of social networking. Apart from that be part of one of the popular Social news networks i.e. Digg.com or Stumbleupon. I’m not saying that go ahead and start spamming these social news networks (it doesn’t work that way, believe me. I’ve failed myself) by submitting your URLs in these networks. But, if you are an active user then most likely you’ll find readers from these services who’ll submit a well written post by you to these networks and Digg and Stumbleupon can get you heaps of traffic! Sometimes it becomes difficult to handle too. [...]

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