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To Digg: Thanks For The Useless Traffic – Or As What Most People Think
Yesterday I posted a rather staggering picture of a chart with an enormous spike. The article image wasn’t detailed enough because there’s only a sentence in there. Although some did get a clue about it, I bet you’re still curious.
Well I didn’t literally got dugg but I’m part of it. You see, Michael of Retire@21 emailed me a month ago asking for an interview. At first, I thought it was just another interview that gets posted and forgotten. But I was pretty surprised when Michael emailed me after posting the interview and at that time it got over 15+ diggs. With fingers crossed, I waited. After a few minutes, the diggs grew higher and higher and when it hit the 30+ mark it stopped.
I lost hope that time because I thought that digg only posts new stories, I didn’t knew that even a 2 hour old story still has the chance to get to the frontpage. I slept without knowing that our interview got in the frontpage. To my surprise Mike emailed me in the morning (night at his) saying it landed on the frontpage.
I got the crazy feeling with a fast heartbeat at that time! Hehe… Just to sum up the long story, I got overflowed with thousands of unique visitors from Mike’s site that resulted to that big spike.
Anyway, here are some of my thoughts about the whole thing:
I Hate Web 2.0 Traffic
- It’s Not Targeted – Digg’s community are mostly peers who love tech, gadgets and “I hate Microsoft”. They just click, check, leave a comment and get away. Heck the average time they stayed on the blog was 60 seconds. That’s a minute less than the normal visitors stay on my blog.
- All You Get Are Negative Comments – I don’t get diggers, all they do is criticize people. They concentrate on the bad stuff, just a single mistake you’ll get buried. And oh, did I tell you that they won’t even read, most of them just skim over the page and leave a negative comment.
- No Buying Power – This is probably the worst of them all. Yes, I can handle bad comments (or ignore them) and I know a way to monetize those untargeted traffic, but no buying power? I got over 200 clicks on one of my affiliate links but ridiculously got no sale.
- You Write For Your Server To Crash – I guess this is self explanatory.
I Love Web 2.0 Traffic
- You Strive For Perfection – Digg is a battleground for me, you get challenged by everyone even to your best intentions, and like what I said earlier, you get a whole truck of criticisms (most of them aren’t constructive at all!) if your article gets on the frontpage. But think of it as a helpful comment, don’t take it personally. Strive for perfection, be thorough on every article you submit.
- Backlinks! – Getting dugg by 200+ diggers is 200+ backlinks from their profiles, just give my name a search.
- Here Comes The Emails Again – On the day I sent the interview to Michael, I created an email capture page to my soon to be company Rich Kid Media. I mentioned it at the end of the interview because that was the only way to cash in through that. At that time I didn’t expect that the interview will get posted on Digg’s frontpage. Though I did expect some signups from that page but not a hundred of em! Yep, on that day I insanely got almost 100+ signups thru Rich Kid Media. Not bad?
Conclusion
I love web 2.0 even if the traffic is not that targeted, there are still possibilities to juice money out of the staggering traffic.
Yes, they hate ads, they hate CPC ads, but what if you make them think that it’s not an ad or something that you can make money with. Like giving away a free report? :twisted:
UPDATE: The title (mommy, can I cash my Google checks now?) of the digg story was from Dean of Deanhunt. Without it, it won’t get in the frontpage!
Carl Ocab is one of the most successful teenage bloggers on the net. But remarkably, Carl was just 13 years old when he rose to fame with his hugely popular “make money online” website: www.carlocab.com
Hi, my name is Carl Ocab or as many call me, the “Kidblogger”. I’m a 16-year old kid from the beautiful archipelago Philippines.
October 20, 2007
9:56 am
Hi Carl,
Congrats.
I wrote the title and description for your Digg article, glad it helped.
Dean
October 21, 2007
3:03 pm
You deserve some love! look up ^
October 20, 2007
2:14 pm
Hey Carl,
Glad you enjoyed the traffic and back links, maby we can do something else together. Dean did a great job with the title and description!
Hope everyone likes the interview!
Michael Dunlop
October 20, 2007
3:34 pm
Great blog, man! :wink:
Good to know that kids like you are now serious with business. Keep it up!
Ian del Carmen
http://FireballPlanet.com
October 21, 2007
3:00 pm
Well hi there Ian!
Glad to see another Filipino internet marketer. Welcome to my blog!
October 21, 2007
5:29 am
thank you, learn another lesson about digg.. love it. why dun you try to write another about stumbleupon too. Should be interesting to read from your own view
October 21, 2007
2:59 pm
I haven’t received any outstanding results from SU yet. The biggest so far was just 500+ pageviews but that was it. I guess I can experiment with SU a little :twisted:
October 21, 2007
8:42 am
I have some doubts of your age when I first saw your blog but it doesn’t matter any more since this blog is informative.
You can’t blame them for the accuses actually, maybe you should try a podcast interview next time. Can I conduct the interview with you? :wink:
October 21, 2007
2:57 pm
Wow *blush* *Nothing to say*
Sure, you can drop me an email anytime ;) And btw, I was thinking of that before. hehe
October 22, 2007
2:50 pm
Traffic is traffic, though, huh!
October 23, 2007
9:37 am
I’ve reached Digg front page on two occasions. The first I got an overwhelming positive response. The second an overwhelmingly negative response. Why? Because the second time I’d forgotten to turn on WP-Cache and the site went down within seconds. About 30,000-60,000 page views squandered. I was not pleased.
October 24, 2007
9:51 am
I’ve never written anything that has appeared on Digg but I do get a lot of StumbleUpon traffic. I recently wrote a post about the overlooked benefits of UNtargeted traffic, as everybody seems to complain about it – it can still be useful, as you have seen.
October 26, 2007
12:39 pm
Doing something like that is too easy. Being dugg means potentially over 300+ USD in cash!
November 15, 2007
5:42 am
Digg is both bad and good but i chose not to digg my blog
November 15, 2007
4:29 pm
I am new to the web 2.0 world and am questioning the quality of traffic. Thanks for your input and I like your concept of treating Digg like a battle ground – I always love a challenge and gosh darn it I will get them to Love Me (or my site)
Chris
February 8, 2008
8:39 am
Digg traffic is never good for monetizing even though I must say you can pull in the odd subscriber. Just be careful over how many of your articles get submitted because knowing digg someone will report spamming.
October 9, 2008
6:25 am
Wow, thanks for your insights on this phenomenon Carl. I always though that if you got the front page on Digg, or any of the other web 2.0 sites, you would have an excellent payday…lol
I had no clue these visitors wouldn’t spend any money…Not to mention it sounds like they’re mean. Oh well, keep at it. I’m sure you’ll eventually find the people who have a more positive outlook on what you have to say.
Take care-Scott