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 [email protected] 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!