Digg and the Little Guy
by Aner Ravon

I am an amateur blogger. I don’t play with SEO tips and tricks, I don’t push my friends to blogroll me, I don’t tail Techcrunch fresh releases for trackbacks. Heck, I never even brushed elbows with Mike Arrington or with Guy Kawasaki!

Sometimes I Digg my own posts. I have also sent a few promotional emails in the past to my own email distribution list, but that’s about it. In short, I am the little guy, sitting comfortably somewhere in the middle of the system. 

This doesn’t mean I am not ambitious though. Last week I conducted an experiment. It’s time to share the results.

On Wednesday we hosted Francois Depayras’ Vista Dolorosa at Degardener, (his second post, hopefully of many more to come).  Since the post was Digg worthy, I dugg it. I then sent an email to 50 of my closest friends asking them to Digg as well.

The results?

24 of my original recipients Dugg. This generated 17 additional Diggs (and 8 comments) from people I don’t know, all in all stopping at 41 Diggs (you are most welcome, by the way, to continue Digging) 

For a while, I was a bit disappointed but then I started seeing the stats. My Google Analytics started climbing rapidly and the number of additional views was totally disproportional to the number of Diggs. At the end of the day, the post generated 500 additional unique viewers and over a 1,000 additional page views! We crossed 1,000 unique viewers and 2,000 page views for the first time in Degardener’s short, one year history. And most importantly - 75 more people subscribed to our RSS feed!

In short, 41 Diggs nearly doubled the daily traffic, each Digg yielding a 20x traffic factor and 2x subscription factor, give or take.  

Degardener is almost a year old now. Traffic has been climbing steadily, and while we do not have gazillions of readers, the few hundreds that do read seem pretty loyal. This is a VERY rewarding feeling.

One email generated 75 more regular readers resulting from a page 3 appearance on Digg. 

While not overwhelming, Digg is certainly friendly to the little guy! 

Aner Ravon
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