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My last post talking about the top 10 reasons this list will be popular on digg was not only popular, but it was a flagship Digg post for me. I knew the digg users would digg it up, but I had no idea it would receive over 5000 diggs. This post is going to be a case study showcasing the Digg effect on my server. The Digg effect is where an article is featured on the homepage on Digg.com and receives tens of thousands of visitors in a very short time period (a huge spike in traffic).

Traffic:
I waited an extra 24 hours before publishing this post to give a better estimate on the actual numbers, but know that I will have received quite a bit more visitors than what is displayed because the Digg post is listed permanently and this is just the spike.

  I had initially expected around a thousand diggs, ten thousand unique visitors, and an average time on the blog around 10 seconds. While 12 seconds on the blog is still terribly low, the other statistics definitely made up for it. My daily RSS readers went from around 140 to 226 for the first 6 hours that the post hit the homepage. The next day (when it gained 4000 more diggs), those numbers increased again to 464. They might even continue to increase again tonight as I have received another 1250+ visitors from the digg post today.

This graph explains the RSS spike perfectly  Revenue:
Revenue was very low for the amount of visitors, but much higher than expected. Digg users are all tech-savvy computer users and seldom click on advertisements. This low statistic is also combined with the fact that I do not over-monetize my site, and the Adsense blocks are not intrusive. The first day the digg post went popular the blog earned $10.43, the second day it earned $16.54, and it has earned a little over $3 today. The money earned from the Digg post is going to be reinvested into a permanent upgrade to get my own Mysql grid-container from my hosting company. They supplied me with a free one for three days due to the spike in traffic, and it seems like my blog is loading faster than it was before the spike hit, so I believe it is worth paying the double monthly hosting fee.

Bandwidth:
The Digg effect only rang up 3819.41 MB worth of bandwidth.

Summary:
The Digg effect was massive, totally over 70,000 visitors and 90,000 pageviews. My RSS subscribers nearly quadrupled, and my blogs awareness skyrocketed. Digg is an incredibly powerful marketing tool, but you have to have a bit of skill, and a lot of luck. My Digg post was made exclusively for digg because I knew that it would be 10000x harder getting a blog marketing, link building, increasing website traffic, or internet marketing post to the homepage as a lot of digg users dislike them. If you want to get your posts to the homepage, you need to write a great article and plan everything out long before you hit publish. For some more basic tips, you can read How to prepare for climbing mount Digg.

Closing Statement:
I would personally like to welcome all of my new readers, including my new RSS readers and email subscribers. If you haven’t found out already, my name is Collin LaHay and this blog is about Blog Marketing and link building strategies, with a lot of other tips to help you increase website traffic. You can read more about me on the about page.