A few weeks ago one of my sites made the homepage of Digg.com. Since then many people have asked what the actual results from this were.
In this news story I will share what has so far come out of this viral marketing campaign.
This article is being reprinted with permission from myself and fellow owner of Smoke420.com Kyle Healey. Many of you have asked what our results of making the homepage of Digg were, and in this article we share all this and more.
I would stress though that most of our success in this came from a great viral marketing idea and the after effects. Just because you generate massive traffic does not mean you will generate new back links or conversions for a single product. Anyways, enjoy the article.
Most webmasters wonder what the true Digg Effect is. Well it's your lucky day, we are going to share it with you in full detail. On December 31st, our website made the homepage and Top 10 on Digg.com for the
Dummies Cover Generator we bought for $15. After experiencing the true "Digg Effect", many fellow webmasters would keep this information close to the cuff, but we remember how curious we were before this happened, so we will go ahead and share everything including the traffic and financial stats that came directly from being on the homepage of Digg.com.
The Beginning
Our website Smoke420.com has only been online in this form since December 9th, as you will see in the picture below. As an avid viral marketer I always look for ideas that will be quick to spread on the internet and drive massive traffic. We launched a fun generator that allows bloggers, webmasters, and myspace members to essentially create their own "For Dummies" book cover.
In the day or so before Digg you can see there was a bump in traffic because this started becoming viral. Within an hour of one of our members posting the generator on Digg, we hit #1 on homepage. Within the first 30 minutes we saw 5000 new visitors. In fact this was a shock to our server and we had to reboot. (Note to aspiring diggers) You better have a strong dedicated server if you plan on making the homepage!
Within 3 hours of hitting the homepage on Digg, we also got posted to De.Licio.Us where we were also number one for a few hours. Below you can see the first image where our traffic was before the Digg, and then the actual traffic after making the homepage. Likewise is a screenshot of our Alexa ranking the following day.
So there is the raw traffic data from initially making the homepage of Digg.com. But actually this is just the beginning. Our website made Digg because of the Dummies Cover Generator. With over 100,000 unique visits in three days, you can't imagine how many other blogs, websites, and forums this thing was posted too. On each new book cover it automatically embeds a backlink to our homepage with targeted anchor text. Likewise many bloggers were kind enough to link to the generator page for others to make their own.
If you know anything about SEO, then you can appreciate how getting hundreds if not thousands of one way incoming links from quality and high PR sites will boost your SE rankings. In fact we have not even seen the fruits of this yet. But we are still getting new links every single day and the SE's are spidering and finding all these wonderful backlinks around the net as we speak.
Dollars and Cents - How much we made
Okay great, we had over 100,000 unique visitors in three days and we generated massive amounts of backlinks to our new site. But what did we make off of all this in terms of cold hard cash? We'll be very honest, about $150 in those initial three days. Yes, 100,000 visitors and only $150. But keep in mind our revenue is driven via pay per click marketing such as adsense and azoogle. Two things here; Firstly, with myspace search terms the actual money we make per click is terrible, around .05. Secondly, diggers historically are very savvy and are not coming from Digg to click on ads. They want to read the story and then click the back button to get back to Digg.
In essence we saw our click-thru rate take a massive dive. We would have probably made 3 times as much money with only 50,000 organic visitors getting to our site via google versus diggers. And on that note people coming to make a generator are not interested in ads either.
The future looks bright!
Since making it to the homepage and top 10 of Digg a week and a half ago, our traffic has obviously backed down a bit to around 20K uniques a day. But without making the homepage of Digg we would not have the massive amounts of high quality backlinks and our generator would not have had that viral boost. Even nine days later, this silly generator is being bounced all over the internet and getting posted in various venues. It will not surprise me in 6 months if we are ranking in the top 3 on google for MySpace Layouts. Now when this happens, the $150 we made in 3 days will be peanuts. Keep in mind just "Myspace Layouts" gets over 3 million searches a month.
So in closing, getting on the homepage of Digg didn't really do anything for us initially except for crash our server, decimate our ppc click-thru rate, and force us to start doing future upgrades and mods on the site immediately. Some day however when we're at 300,000 unique visitors a day and ranking in the top 3 for all our targeted search terms, we will look back and say it all started on New Years Eve at Digg.com
Thanks Digg and more thanks to the Diggers and Bloggers!
***Disclaimer - We're not potheads, Smoke420.com was the oldest domain name we owned at the time of launching a new site.....all SEO sandbox crap***
Jun 17, 2008
Making The Homepage of Digg - The Final Results
