The last few weeks at Digital Inspiration have been quite interesting. Some of our blog posts managed to get on the radar screens of eminent blogging personalities like Jeff Jarvis, Nicholas Karr, Robert Scoble, Dave Winer, Darren Rowse, Michael Parekh and Steve Rubel.
Just wanted to share a couple of differences between getting noticed by A-listers vs getting on the Digg front pages:
Increase in Site Traffic - Digg will flood your blog with new visitors so much so that your web-host may even confuse that new traffic with a DDoS attack. On the other side, the traffic coming from A-list blogs might be disappointing - you may see regular traffic increasing by 1K or 2K but nothing drastic.
Diggers will just Digg - If the Digg flood likes your post, they'll probably increase the Digg count by 1 and leave. The A-list traffic is likely to spread the word by bookmarking to del.icio.us or even blog about the post by adding their own perspective or opinion.
Digg Discourages, A-listers Encourage - The traffic from A-list blog will leave meaningful comments that add value to the conversation. The Digg crowd will never leave comments on your site but they'll do so on the actual Digg page. In most case, the comments (or curses) from Diggers will make you feel depressed unless you write about Kevin Rose, Diggination or 10 Reasons Why Vista Sucks.
RSS Subscribers - The majority of Digg crowd will visit your site for one-tenth of a second. On the other hand, visitors from A-list bloggers will relatively spend more time on your blog, they'll be interested in the blogger profile and may eventually subscribe. So you might notice an upswing in RSS subscribers after getting noticed by A-listers.
Blog Revenue - Traffic is never proportional to revenue if you're using Adsense or other advertising programs that are a mix of CPC and CPM ads. You might notice higher page impressions during Digg days but the CTR and effective CPM will reduce so the net result would stay the same. The situation maybe slightly different when you have CPM ads on the blog.
Page Rank - Getting on Digg is unlikely to boost your page rank or search engine rankings - infact, there are cases when the Digg pages rank higher than the actual page it is linking to. But getting on A-list blogs will probably bring lot of Google and Technorati Juice.
Find this article at: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/01/getting-noticed-by-list-bloggers-vs.html
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
A very nice blog about listbloggers vs getting on diggfront pages, and nice information
Written on 24/1/07 9:22 PM
Great article...and I tend to think that Digg is more of a curse than anything for the reasons you listed in this article. I don't care if I never made a Digg page for the things I write or information I provide on my blog. My reason for blogging is to get my opinion out there, my assessment, or to bring obscure information out to those who visit my blog. This is gratifying to me and means alot more to me than high volumes of traffic or advertising revenue. This reason will also probably keep me in the dark abyss of the blogosphere, but I am cool with that...for in the end it is ultimately what I enjoy or am pleased with that matters.
My two cents...thanks for another great article Amit!
Written on 24/1/07 9:28 PM
Amit,
I guess gone are the days when only those banned by Adsense should think about Kontera and the like. The Adsense TOS has now been modified to allow other contextual ads to appear alongside Adsense.
http://www.jensense.com/archives/2007/01/its_official_yo.html
Written on 25/1/07 12:02 AM
Nice observations, Amit. In my experience, just one link from a site with authority, especially one within your own subject's neighborhood, is far more valuable than most social media buzz. The social media sites aren't totally invaluable though - anything outside of a bad neighborhood that serves to get your site noticed, even for a short period of time, can't hurt unless it brings your site to its knees.
Written on 25/1/07 7:32 AM
This is very true.
I frequent Digg myself, and yes, a front page story will get you traffic, but like you said, the conversion rate is horrible.
Case in point: while building up my RSS feeds in Google Reader, I found some of my favorites through other bloggers, most of them A-listers in their field.
Another great place is http://del.icio.us, as I find it a little less biased than Digg.
Thanks for the great article :)
Written on 25/1/07 9:17 AM
Nice post Amit. Most of the content in your blog is very interesting.
I started a new blog.
http://money-balance.blogspot.com
Well I am still in the begining stages and trying to bring myself to blogospere. I did some blogs ealier also. I hope reading good blogs like yours will help me to keep the focus on..
rgds.
Written on 25/1/07 11:14 PM
This article was a great read.
Readers here might also like to check out:
http://www.smallbusinesshub.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/1104/Why-Making-the-Home-Page-of-TechCrunch-is-Better-than-Digg.aspx
which I found a few minutes ago while researching this topic
I plan to write up a post of my findings as well, in time.
- Alister
Written on 26/1/07 6:30 PM
very informative and great researched blog...thx kindly for that
Reg
Marv
My Photocompetition
Written on 26/1/07 8:01 PM
Alister, looking forward to read your views on the Digg vs A-list subject.
Written on 27/1/07 9:42 PM
I just have one question. How do you get noticed by A-List bloggers? I mean, if your content is good or you think it's good, how to you get in their view?
Turtle King
http://turtlesatwork.blogspot.com
Written on 14/5/07 11:38 PM
Thanks very informative except yes as said before how do you get noticed by
"A-List Bloggers"?
Written on 24/5/07 9:58 PM
An interesting post, indeed. I would be interested to look into seeing what the differences are with other Social Bookmarking sites like Stumbleupon and others.
Written on 21/6/07 5:39 AM
Nice post regarding the preferred source of traffic. I would much rather be blogged about by people such as John Chow and others then making the front page of Digg. Your website would handle traffic from A-List bloggers than front page Digg traffic.
Written on 13/9/07 3:14 PM
Excellent blog, it helps alot..... Thanks amit. Please write more on increase traffic.
Written on 10/10/07 1:01 AM