The Digg Effect
I have written in the past about how to use StumbleUpon to promote. Shortly after I wrote that article, I got over 10,000 page views to one of my articles on PC Mechanic in one day. Just to one article. Since then, I have hit a few other little “sweet spots” with StumbleUpon and gotten good traffic. Not as big as that 10,000 visitor spike, but still nice. So, StumbleUpon has proven itself to me as a very viable way to bring traffic to your site.
Yesterday, I posted an article over at PC Mechanic entitled “Can Linux Replace Windows?“. It made it’s way onto Digg. I had nothing to do with that. On the 10,000 page view one, I did seed StumbleUpon myself with the article. With Digg, somebody else did it. Well, this one did good as well, and Digg is about to surpass StumbleUpon in terms of the volume of traffic brought to a single article on the site in one day.
Yesterday, Digg brought in 4,620 page views to that article. Today, so far, I’ve had 4,970. That number is sure to be higher by the end of the day. So, all in all, Digg is outperforming StumbleUpon.
No doubt that the subject matter plays a large role in this. What I’m finding from that post and other I wrote on the subject is that people REALLY take their operating systems seriously. And Linux-users are particularly defensive about professing how perfect Linux is and how crappy Windows is. So, I’ve had over 50 comments on that post - some agreeing with me and many giving me a hard time. It’s OK, I can take it. 
One thing I have noticed is that Digg users are not as likely to surf around as StumbleUpon users. Most Digg users come, read, and bolt. And that article is currently seeing a 95% bounce rate. Last month, StumbleUpon gave me a bounce rate about half that. So, Digg users are much more fickle.
Digg is good for a nice spike, but I know that it isn’t going to be a long lasting one.
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Comments
After checking out your site and seeing that headline “Flash Sucks”, I can guess which one of your article was Dugg. 
[...] A few days ago, I posted an article saying that I got “Dugg”, meaning I got an article onto Digg.com and it sent me a big traffic spike. This was for an article called “Can Linux Replace Windows?” published over on PC Mechanic. I thought I would share with you the stats from the Digg Effect using screenshots from Google Analytics. [...]
Hey David, nice post. I’m always interested in hearing how much traffic people are getting from various sources. I’ve noticed a lot of the same things you have: Digg users don’t stick around long, and tend not to comment. StumbleUpon is a great source of interested users (possibly because they use collaborative filtering) and can provide as many page views as Digg.
StumbleUpon Buzz will definitely give you a nice traffic boost too. And if you can get on del.icio.us popular (you’ll need ~15 bookmarks in a few hours) then you have a pretty good chance of making it to the delicious home page, which will give you a few thousand clickthrus.
Also, the type of content you’re promoting can have a huge impact on the number of people who click through, particularly on Digg. I’ve been on Digg a number of times, and most of the time I’ve gotten around 10,000 or so referrals from various digg.com pages. But yesterday a post I wrote that turned out to be very controversial (I didn’t consider it that controversial when I wrote it, just an opinion) made it to the Digg home page and my site received over 70,000 page views in a 12 hour period. The story made it to #1 in the top 10 list, which probably helped. It’s by far the most traffic I’ve received from a single source. Just another interesting stat you can add to your list.