Digg pros & cons

I constantly read horror stories here of "bursts" of traffic, crashing bandwidths from the thousands of visitors coming in from Digg.

I have not posted to Digg but am wondering, if Digg brings in, supposedly, so much traffic, why isnt everyone doing it?
Or is everyone doing it and I'm loosing out?
What exactly are the pros and cons if getting your articles placed in Digg.com?

 

Everyone is doing it, only the good articles get the tons of traffic.

Digg visitors are worthless as consumers. They dont click ads or visit other sections of the site. Digg is a place to find news, not click on ads. Dont expect anything but high bandwith usage.

 

Getting "Dugg" will bring you a ton of traffic. Although Diggers don't stay on your site for long or click ads for that matter. (unless you are lucky enough to have CPM ads on your site)

But one can hope that if someone finds your site from Digg they will become a regular visitor and perhaps click an ad another day. Or even perhaps post a link to your article from their site and bring you even more traffic.

Any traffic is good traffic in my opinion.

 

my CTR from getting a story on the first page of digg was about half of what it normally was. that's not where the real value comes from though.

after that day, I was posted into tons of other blogs, plenty of which had very high PR and decent traffic. links to my site were posted all over the place, usually preceded by "I found this link on dig..."

hell, I even made it onto an msnbc column because of it.

and this is all when I wasn't prepared for the traffic, I can hardly imagine what it would've been like it my server would've handled things better.

 

OK, I think I'll give it a go.
What I've learned from your posts is :
- make a quality article to attract diggs
- make sure your bandwidth can handle high volume traffic
- make the landing page as appealing as possible to try to motivate at least a few to linger on the site
- don't expect more than 0.1% to linger...realistic?

Am I missing anything?

What can a new article submitter do to get the attention needed?
How long did it take for you to start getting visitors?

I'm not expecting clicks on ads.
I AM however hoping to raise my PR - will this do it?

 

If you're lucky.

The best thing to do with articles I get on digg, imho, is to put a big ass bold link at the top, bottom, and in the middle of the article saying CLICK HERE TO BOOKMARK THIS SITE.

 

Thanks Brizzad
Any more suggestions?

 

Keep this in mind too. A smaller and smaller amount of articles are making it to the home page. Digg is getting much more agressive in removing articles which people report as spam, or are self promoting type submissions. Maybe 1 in 200 get to the homepage.

 

Thanks SonicReducer
My articles are originals and not self-promo, which gives me a head start.
But I will post one to see what happens.
Heck everyone else has...and the curiosity is killing me.

But the question remains - will this do anything for my PR?

 

most likely the PR benefit won't be direct, at least not much of it. sure, the main page of digg is high in PR, but you won't be on the main page for long. the sub pages don't have much PR at all.

however, that doesn't mean you won't get a potential increase in PR. I got the highest number of incoming PR6 and PR7 links in the shortest timespan ever after I got to the front page of digg-- the real power lies in the people that find your site through digg and then link to it elsewhere.

 

That's good to know "disgust" and thanks for your feedback.
I'll post my results here when completed for anybody who may have the same curiosity as I have.

 

OK this is probably exposing how ignorant of digg I am - I understand the mechanics - EXCEPT - how do you submit an article to be dugg? For example I have a very unique site in that it is offering a service that to my knowledge no other site in it's niche is offering. I will be writing a press release about the site within a couple weeks. Is a press release enough of an "article" to get the site dugg? And is it the article itself or the destination the article refers to that gets dugg?

 

--------------------------

So far I have had 8 stories submitted, but the highest amount of diggs for any of them is 9.
It can take tons of stories before even one makes it to the main page, if ever ?

 

Well, just to report back to those of you interested, I submitted an article to the links section about 40 minutes ago.
No diggs but so far I've had 20 clickthrus to the one page. ie. as others posted here, diggers don't surf your site.
Its early days yet, but results aren't as scary as I thought.

I'd be interested in hearing about other such digg-like article-submitting services.

 

Ive just tried creating an account at digg.com, did anyone notice they had to wait a while before receiving the confirmation email? i requested a resend but still waiting.

Its only been a few minutes, i guess im so used to emails arriving instantly.

 

Yes, I emailed their feedback and they rsvp almost immediately announcing that they'd manually loaded my account. So do that.

 

Thanks Jamie Lister, ive just emailed them.

 

Good.
When you get your articles up, it would be good if you could submit your views on the results you get.

I for one have had one article up for over 2 hours now, no diggs, about 30 visitors and 2 clicks on ads.
Not unimpressed with results but you certainly dont get a burst of traffic and you'll need all the help you can get.

 

No problem, il do that, still no reply from them yet, but i was forgetting thats its the holidays, as soon as i can access my account il put up an article and post my results, im curious about this at least.

 

Not gotten to the first page of digg, but I have gotten to the first page of ShoutWire.

It's not nearly as popular of a site, so I only got maybe 1000 visitors or so out of it. They didn't do much for my Adsense earnings, but I probably got some extra traffic and regular readers out of it.

Shoutwire seemingly deletes about 95% of stories posted, but digg still sends me traffic (although not more than a few people each day) for stories submitted weeks ago. So there is some (small) residual value, as well.