Brandon Adcock dot comMy Thoughts, Mostly on Direct Response Marketing

Here is my attempt at a recap on making the #1 article across all sections on Digg, on August 17th. I wish I had been able to do this sooner, but I have been terribly busy at work, not to mention in Michigan watching my Mountaineers beat the Wolverines. I’ll talk more about that in another post.

This is the picture that made #1:

Quick Facts on my Digg Post here. These numbers are total numbers to date starting from the day it was submitted to Digg, August 16th.

92,470 Pageviews and 81,224 Unique Views (just for the How to get Fired from Dairy Queen Picture)

2:23 Average Time on Page (I am surprised it was this high)

Ever wonder what a #1 article on Digg looks like in terms of analytics? Here is what my Google Analytics looks like:

As you can see, it was a huge spike in traffic. I had been averaging ~100 uniques a day before the article was dugg. Since the Digg, my traffic has stayed higher than it was previously, and I saw ~2k users a day for a week after the article was on Digg, coming to my site for that picture. My Alexa rating was as high as 18,000 for a one week average, and my 3 month average jumped from ~625,000 to ~150,00. While I know the Alexa rankngs are very rough and flawed, it still serves as a decent measure.

This is what my Alexa graph looks like (3 month trend first and 1 month trend 2nd)

As you can see again, the traffic spike was huge, and the traffic lasted for 7-10 days.

After further examing the pageviews from this article, Digg accounted for about 65k of the pageviews out of 92k. I received a fair amount of stumble traffic to this post, the day of the digg and in the 3 days following it. In total, about 15k pageviews of that article came from stumble. I am assuming that many Digg users also use other social platforms, such as stumble, and Digg can be used to magnify stumble traffic. Meaning, many people who come from Digg.com might also be using the stumble bar, and can stumble the site, knocking out “two bird with one stone”.

Now that we have covered traffic overview, let me cover links. According to Yahoo!’s site explorer, I received 277 links to this post, none of which I created except for the original Digg submission. Not bad. These incoming links also have increase my Technorati ranking pretty significantly.

How much money did I make off the Digg post? Get ready for this, a whopping $0. I did not have ads running on this site when I submitted the article. Terrible I know. I have learned my lesson and the next time I get on Digg, I hope to make some money.

Takeways from being on Digg:

1) Increased my exposure and traffic

2) Boosted my Alexa rank. This is nice in case I want to sell links or ad space, since many brokers use Alexa rankings as a factor

3) I saw some traffic spillover to other sites that I run which did have ads on them

4) I received 277 links to my site

5) Received 59 published comments to the picture, many more but I had to delete quit a few. However, I didn’t receive one spam comment that I noticed. They were all real

6) Next time, make sure the site is monetized

7) Digg can help amplify stumble traffic

Let me know if there is anything else you would like to see.