Digg still strong, some insights

Yesterday I got another article dugg by someone:
http://digg.com/technology/222_megapixel_image_of_Machu_Picchu_in_Peru.
It became so popular, that my shared hosting account went down. It took me a full day to get it back up, but guess what, today traffic is still strong.
When another article of mine got dugg, it also was very popular, but after a day the traffic was gone.
So I checked AWStats to see what is going on and it seems like this thing was picked up by some other really nice traffic sources like this one:
http://www.citybeat.de/news/artikel.html?id=2071389
Actually traffic is still so strong, that I will have to make some redirect changes to fetch large chunks from an old (still active) hosting account.

This made me rethink the whole digg one more time.
Seems to me that as a source of traffic digg is very good, even if the traffic does not convert. But the real benefit is that a lot of potential publishers can see your stuff and may decide to link your article.
I have seen a lot of posts of people saying that Digg traffic is not targeted and does not convert, however the follow up traffic defenitely will be.
I have also learned some lessons about preparing a site for a digg attack. I will now make sure my cache :
http://www.aguntherphotography.com/projects/website_cache.htm
will run properly and load large images from a secondary hosting account. If that one gets shut down due to traffic my main site is still unaffected.
This way my site has to serve only static html without images. It should be able to withstand a large amount of traffic.
Unfortunately my site went down very quickly after getting 666 diggs (yeah, the number of the beast). If it would have stayed up, I would have been able to get a lot more traffic and exposure.

Another interesting thing is all the secondary sites that use digg data:
http://dugmirror.com
http://digdot.us
http://popurls.com

Even though I have not submitted the article myself, I have now a whole new opinion of Digg and the good things it can do for you.

 

It doesn't matter if the traffic doesn't convert on Digg. It will be nice if it did convert, but if it didn't then there are always other webmasters that are likely to see your articles and then publish them on their sites, which will give you some good backlinks.

 

Exactly and that's people who cheat on Digg.com with their poor articles don't seem to understand.

 

Yeah. Thats what I wanted to outline with my post. I am still seing some new referers popping up in my stats and my traffic for the last two days was constantly 1000 above normal. Doesn't seem to taper off so fast this time. I am sure the buzz will be over in a while too but this "secondary" traffic does stay much longer on my site.
I just learned the importance of Digg by this experience.