Early this week 14th Colony hit the Digg home page and also went popular on del.icio.us. It was an exciting ride and I thought I’d share some of the things I learned.

The article that “made it” is How to Choose a Breakthrough Domain Name. It is the first of a four-part series about selecting the best domain name for your website.

I found out the story had been submitted late Sunday night. Being clever, I voted for it making 14 Diggs total. I didn’t think much of it and went to bed. The next morning I had an email from Mike Levin of hittail congratulating me and suggesting I add a link to his site. (Sorry Mike, couldn’t do it but I’ll give you one here!)

I jumped on Digg and couldn’t believe my eyes - one of my articles had gone popular with more than 400 votes!

After that, I monitored progress using hittail. I discovered the article had been submitted to del.icio.us as well and went popular there too. Someone submitted it to stumbleupon as well. This brought a great deal of traffic in a very short period of time. I was a bit concerned about how my server would hold up but my host is excellent and there wasn’t even the smallest bump in performance - thank you Royalty Hosting!

First Day Stats

Digg: 12,527

Del.ic.ious: 616

Stumbleupon: 87

Other social bookmarking sites: 18

Other Important Sources of Traffic

Most people are aware of the domino effect of a Digg. Once a story goes popular on one social bookmarking site it usually shows up on others. But what I don’t see much discussion about is the RSS aggregators. Because Digg and del.icio.us and other social bookmarking sites offer RSS feeds of their popular stories many sites display these feeds leading to even more traffic. I put these in 3 camps: Scrapers, Personal Feed Readers and News Bites.

Scrapers - These sites just push out the feeds from the top social bookmarking sites without offering any unique content. Traffic: 421

Personal Feed Readers - These are accounts like bloglines or personalized portals. Traffic: 161

News Bites - Sites that offer their own content but have feeds on the side. Traffic: 4

Total Day 1 Traffic: 13,800+

Alexa Traffic Data

I titled this post “Minor Digg” because the article was only popular for a day. At some point the commenters realized that I not only recommend GoDaddy but I also have an affiliate link to GoDaddy within the article.

The article is several months old and GoDaddy was involved in a scandal at the end of February.

While I think the recent problem at GoDaddy was an isolated incendent, I should have taken a page from Dale Carnegie’s book and just let it go instead of attempting to defend myself in the comments. The article was not buried but new votes dropped considerably.

Dugg Trends Voting Data

Long-Term Effects

While the traffic dropped considerably for day 2, the total traffic from this experience has topped 16,000 so far. That’s a lot of exposure to people that probably wouldn’t have come across this site any other way. I don’t think that traffic is targeted but I did make a little extra money through Adsense… and yes the GoDaddy affiliate link also worked.

The article also picked up about a dozen new links. And got a mention on Geek News Central - how cool is that? (You can skip ahead to minute 35 to hear it yourself.)

Major Lessons

Be Prepared - You don’t know when something on your site is going to catch attention. As mentioned, this article was several months old. I was surprised to see it do so well so long after it was published.

Play Nice - I shouldn’t have argued with the Digg commenters. While some of them are rude it really is their territory and it is best to respect that.

Be cautious with ads - Although most Diggers don’t care about advertising, the “vocal minority” has a lot of power. I had forgot the affiliate link was there untill they pointed it out. That could have been handled better.

Stay Current - Recommending GoDaddy so soon after their PR mess hurt my results probably more than anything else. I still stand by them as they have worked well for me for almost 10 years. And I can only recall them being helpful when needed. Still, if my objective had been to really milk the exposure I would have changed that part of the article as soon as it was pointed out (and removed the link). Digg is about “news” after all.

Be Grateful - Thanks to everyone that Dugg this article. I had a lot of fun watching this effect in my logs and a bit of extra exposure for a business is always a good thing. I’d especially like to thank the guy that submitted it.

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