Failing to Make the Digg Homepage Can be a Blessing in Disguise

Glen Allsopp / 21 Comments / August 30th, 2007 / Subscribe via RSS

Just over a week ago, I wrote a blog post for another site of mine which looked at how the Technorati Top 100 blogs had hit the Digg homepage over 8,000 times. This is content that took me a long time to write, had some interesting results and is likely to be considered ‘remarkable’. There was nothing wrong with this in stopping it hit the Digg Homepage. The post received over 60 Digg’s which built up towards the end of the day then stopped receiving more as it left the ‘Upcoming pages’ due to being more than 24 hours old.

What Did I Do right?

When I tell you what I did right it will be easier for me to explain what I did wrong. First of all I wrote good content, I’m not boosting up my ego here but it took a few hours work and I made sure there were some graphs to make the information digestable. Seeing as the blog was very new it was very unlikely that any of the ‘big guys’ in the blogging / marketing industries would have picked up on it naturally so I sent out a few emails. That day the post was mentioned on ProBlogger, AndyBeard, Marketing Pilgrim and the Sphinn homepage, some of the most popular sites in the world. As you can imagine this sent me a lot of targeted, relevant traffic and even more links from around the web, thing’s were going good.

What Do I Think I Did wrong?

When I had written the post a day before it went out, I had placed the Digg button on the post and set it to go out the next morning. Waking up I submitted the post to Digg and sent out some emails mentioned to those who I thought would be interested. Finally I submitted the story to Sphinn as I thought the community would find it interesting.

I soon realised that I had the Digg submit button on the homepage of the site and the single post, but the one on the homepage was trying to Digg the hompage of the site and not the actual story. I quickly ended up with the same content & title’s submitted twice. Never-the-less I still don’t think that is what thwalted hitting the homepage, I tried for about 20 minutes to find a work around but in the end I just removed the Digg link and button completely. Then the traffic started coming in from the biggest blogs on the web, lots of traffic and I had missed my opportunity to ask them to Digg the page. Later that day I added a text link to the Digg story and the Digg’s did start rising but it was too little too late. I was a bit disappointed as on a site that talks about how quality content pays off, I really wanted to lead by example and show my readers that even a new site can make it and can run out of the starting blocks.

Blessing in Disguise?

Thinking things through, hitting the Digg homepage would have only been good to talk about, nothing else would have been gained from the achievement. Using shared hosting the site would have gone offline in minutes and the relevant, targetted traffic I was getting from other sites wouldn’t have been able to see the story for at least 24 hours, never mind talk about it or link too it.

The relevant traffic I was getting would not have been able to subscribe to the feed, they may not even have remembered to come back to the site. I’m glad the story didn’t make the Digg homepage, I’m not just saying that because it didn’t make it, but it’s a good lesson in how social media bragging rights aren’t everything. Getting mentioned on some of the top blogs out there to me is more important than thousands of people crushing your server and having a high chance of never coming back.

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