How to get the most out of digg traffic

A lot of people consider digg traffic as being useless because they think most digg visitors will never come back to your blog. This is not necessarily true, especially if you do a few tweaks to your blog so you can actually get some benefit from the traffic. These tweaks will not only help you retain visitors from digg, but also will help retain regular visitors as well.

RSS Subscribers
Most of visitors that come to your blog from digg will probably never come back, but you can improve your odds by placing a prominent RSS subscription somewhere on your web pages.

digg rss growth

If your subscription link is prominent digg can provide a lot of RSS subscribers but after a day or so most of them will drop off. If you look at the graph you will notice that after a post making it to the digg front page, the RSS subscriber count never dropped to the original amount, there was always a slight increase.

Comments
When your blog gets bombarded with traffic there is a good chance that a few of the digg visitors will post comments. Don't make those visitors feel like they are talking to themselves, make sure you follow up on their comments. By following up you are building a relationship which will increase the likelihood of the commenter coming back to your blog.

Post Titles
One of the main reasons people love digg is because it can increase your incoming links which results in search engine love.

google search optimizing your blog

Make an attractive post title with a keyword that you are trying to get ranked for, that way after the digg traffic dies down the search engine traffic will pick up.

Content
Many of the visitors that come to your blog from digg will roam around to see what else you have to offer. Make sure you have a lot of easily accessible content so the visitors can get a feel of what your blog is all about. If the visitor likes what you have to offer there is a good chance that they will convert into a regular reader.

You might not be able to predict when you are going to get on digg, but if you do all of these things you will be able to get the most out of the digg traffic when your blog hits the front page. So if you want to get the most out of digg traffic be prepared and do not wait until the last minute to tweak your blog.

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Reader Comments (11)

[GEEKS ARE SEXY] Tech. News, October 25, 2006

It is also important to keep visitors on your site as long as you can. The longer they stay, the bigger the change they'll subscribe to your feed. Cross-link your articles abundantly and ask interaction from your audience. This will definitely help you turn 1 time readers into loyal subscribers.

engtech, October 25, 2006

I'm pretty sure the reason why there is an initial big jump in RSS stats when your Dugg is because of people who have subscribed to a Digg RSS feed -- not your feed.

But they still show up as RSS readers, they just aren't reading YOUR RSS feed.

At least that's what I've noticed from my logs.

Christopher Trottier, October 25, 2006

It also helps if you keep the content of your blog "viral" in nature. This is especially true for advertising. Digg provokes people towards linking to your content. I've seen it again and again, and this is why I'm a loyal Digg user.

Allen, October 25, 2006

I think people will link to Dugg content and that is the best part of it. While for me, most of the traffic viewed that one page and left, many linked to it - which rocked. Some wish there were more, I say even just one extra link is worth it.

I posted an article about Digg from a business standpoint as well: http://www.centernetworks.com/digg-business-standpoint

Neil Patel, October 25, 2006

Engtech, thanks for pointing that out.

Pascal Van Hecke, October 26, 2006

I'm sorry, but the Engtech explanation is not satisfactory. Subscribers to the Digg feed will simply result in page views, not in requests to your rss feed, and not in clickthroughs from your feed (as measured by the "Item Use" you enabled in your Feedburner Totalstats package).

The reason is that browsers like Firefox prefetch your feed, even while the users just visits a page, without clicking the feed url.

These statistics used to show up as "Firefox Live Bookmars" subscribers, but they're not subscribers in any way... So that's why a visitor's peak coincides with an rss subscription peak, and why you stats drop so abruptly afterwards. If I'm not mistaken, Feedburner doesn't count these hits as real subscribers nowadays, so next time you're dugg, there shouldnt be a spike that sharp.

Pascal Van Hecke, October 26, 2006

I see my explanation is a bit quirky: 2d paragraph should be:

"The spikes you see aren't really subscribers. The real reason for the sudden spikes is..."

Tony, October 26, 2006

After visiting the same blog on multiple occasions, a sense of 'brand' and quality (consistent links to) starts to build up, and I tend to subscribe to RSS after 2nd, maybe 3rd visit. (so it's good to have a unique, easily identifiable layout, not the default theme everybody else has)

It kind of shows through in the chart - after two close spikes (4th, 5th) there seems to be a steady stream at an elivated level.

Neil Patel, October 26, 2006

Pascal, I am seeing the same thing with FeedBurner. It seems that their counting method may be a little more accurate now.

engtech, October 27, 2006

Pascal, thanks for the clarification.

april, October 29, 2006

Always wondered how digg worked. thanks for the insight. signing up with them today