A few weeks after the launch of my experimental blog you’re reading right now I’ve had a huge success with a few news stories. Literally visitors up to my ears, loads of emails and both good and bad criticism. Generally I’m very good at taking criticism so I think I’ve handled it well. The worst thing you could do when receiving a bad comment is censoring it, since you then will cause more anger with the readers, so I have approved every comment not spam.
Much of the success with the blog is because of Digg. Some of my articles have been promoted and this is what I have learned from it.
Everything can’t get promoted
The community at Digg is great and I consider it to be the best on the net. When submitting a news story to Digg a few things must be remembered. Spam will get filtered away very quickly, only one of the first posting the news will get promoted to the front page and technology news is the most likely type that will be successful.
Getting a good old fashioned article like this to be popular is hard work and very much harder than regular news is.
Cache is great for the Digg Effect
The first two promoted articles I had generated a total of 12000 visitors and the busiest hour had 2000 visitors. That is something that could cause an unprepared website to collapse. I wasn’t prepared but survived anyway, which I’m very thankful for. Still, when I looked at the bandwidth used I realized that something had to be done. 10 GB was used up in one day! For a small scale website like mine which is hosted on a server with lots of other sites that is not to good.
I installed a component to my blog system(Wordpress) called wp-cache and that seams to have done the thing. I’m not exactly sure how much more people I can receive but at least the double.
So be prepared for the worst even though the risk for overload can be small.
Comments can be rude but is generally very true
I have realized that my pride has been damaged since my first article was posted. Many comments have pointed out faults in my language, accusing me of blog spamming and told me I suck worse than their mother delivering accurate tech news.
Although I have been hurt I have to agree with those comments, at least some anyway. I don’t have the best language and maybe my news aren’t of that much importance. About me blog spamming, I can partly agree. The main purpose of this blog was to get a basic idea of what was needed to get visitors to your blog on Internet. An investigation on marketing. However, after getting the point that good articles generates the most traffic the purpose has changed.
The shout system on Digg will shake things up a bit
With the new messaging system Dig will be more attractive for people searching not only for a site finding stories but for a community.
BUT as pointed out before this will also have a bad effect. Articles can be shared freely by people wanting to get votes. That will become the new way to promote one’s stories.
Oh no, I get tons of spam
Off course every blog on the net gets spam some time during their existence. I have, however, received very much spam to my commenting system. I feel bad about implementing a anti-spam system since it makes people avoid posting comments.
Instead I review every comment that I get, something that is very time consuming but I feel it is good for my visitors. Every blogger must make the decision, just accepting all comments won’t be good.
EDIT:
“Actually, in response to your comment about Digg comments, they are generally very ill thought through and , for lack of a better word, retarded.
I wouldn’t even come close to imagining that any more than 2% of comments written on Digg are written by people with an education past third grade.“
I would like to promote this comment made by Keith to this article because it does have a very good point. Some people have commented on the little spelling mistake in the title. I’d like to congratulate those for noticing it and but still I feel sorry that they didn’t get the joke.
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16 responses so far ↓
1 Johnson // Sep 22, 2007 at 10:27 pm
Interesting, I had a site that made the frontpage once and I received a ton of spam through my e-mail. Lots of e-mail from people who were sending me messages trying to advertise their company and how their company could offer me the best and fastest server, or products geared towards digg type traffic. It was insane.
2 Sam // Sep 22, 2007 at 10:29 pm
I refuse to digg because of the awful spelling in the title.
3 trav // Sep 22, 2007 at 10:30 pm
This website is a horrible waste of space.
4 Ryan McGovern // Sep 22, 2007 at 10:32 pm
There are Wordpress plugins that will do spam filtering for you that will not cause users to do any kind of CAPTCHA or other erroneous steps to prove they are not spam. For example i use Akismet.
Then again you could already be using that and still be getting spam, though it works for me (though no one visits my blog :-P)
5 Chris // Sep 22, 2007 at 10:43 pm
For your spam problem, do you have the Akismet plugin enabled? I know on my site it has caught all but maybe two spam comments.
Although this does remind me that I have been forgetting to install wp-cache.
6 Keith // Sep 22, 2007 at 11:02 pm
Actually, in response to your comment about Digg comments, they are generally very ill thought through and , for lack of a better word, retarded.
I wouldn’t even come close to imagining that any more than 2% of comments written on Digg are written by people with an education past third grade.
7 Diego R // Sep 23, 2007 at 12:01 am
Your whole blog has nothing but spam!!! is what I would say if it actually was. Nice article and keep up the good work.
8 Ryan Pieszak // Sep 23, 2007 at 12:04 am
Excellent article. I’m new to Digg, but I’ve noticed the Digg affect has taken it’s toll on plenty of ill-prepared sites. Painful at first, but seems a small price to pay to learn a good lesson quickly.
9 Stevan Ljuljdurovic // Sep 23, 2007 at 1:11 am
Hey, you get +1 digg from me, I really like your blog design and I like how you are honest. I just made my own website but I don’t use wordpress so I can’t cache stuff until I learn how. I agree that digg is a great community and I just wanted to let you know I think your website is great.
10 Jon Anderson // Sep 23, 2007 at 3:11 am
I’ve virtually eliminated spam at my blog by installing a simple captcha and disabling trackbacks. Before I did that, I had decent success by putting the most common spam words in the “hold for moderation” filter, along with posts with more than 5 links.
With the captcha, I don’t have to moderate like I used to, and it doesn’t force users to register.
11 scottievm // Sep 23, 2007 at 6:30 am
i don’t like SPAM!
12 techguy // Sep 23, 2007 at 7:11 am
Don’t be silly about spam comments. Implement Akismet and be mostly done with spam comments.
13 bvtaa // Sep 25, 2007 at 1:40 pm
Yupp, Akismet here too. It’s a great tool.
14 Carlo // Oct 1, 2007 at 1:31 am
I just implemented caching in my blog. I hope it’s enough.
15 Ponder Marketing » Blog Archive » Digg it // Oct 6, 2007 at 3:39 am
[…] incredibly fast. Fast enough to melt your server. Here’s an interesting post on the subject, Things learned from the Digg Effect. addthis_url = ‘http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pondermarketing.com%2F%3Fp%3D222′; addthis_title = ‘Digg+it’; […]
16 Wahoo // Oct 7, 2007 at 8:07 am
Thank you for sharing!
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