Web 2.0 sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit are relatively new. They appeared on the scene in the last 2 years and are growing in popularity. Digg, launched in early 2005 is already one of the top 100 sites on Alexa. Reddit and Stumbleupon are in the top 1000 and rising fast.
The idea behind these sites:
- Users submit interesting stories, articles and videos from all across the web.
- Other users vote up good stories and vote down poor ones.
- The best stories appear on the front page and get tens of thousands of visitors.
How do you use these systems to generate traffic?
Simple – write something that will likely end up on their main page.
Daniel Tynski os SEOMoz shares his story:
Recently, our SEO company Voltier Inc took on a local used car dealer in West Palm Beach, Florida, as a client. We were hired to bring customers to the dealership through referrals from the website.
In conjunction with doing various on page SEO, it has been my job to get this site indexed (as it had 0 pages indexed on all search engines when my work began). Things were progressing fairly steadily, but with only around a month of link building, I’d seen only modest results in Google and Yahoo.
Now comes the interesting part.
As Part of our Link Building efforts, I released a number of articles meant as Link Bait. I wrote an article about airbag fraud, about best SEO practices for car dealers, the most dangerous drivers on the road, and a few others. The brainstorming was slow going, but on a whim I came up with an idea I thought could possibly be popular on a site like Digg or Reddit. The bad part was that the article didn’t really have anything to do with used cars….
What I came up with was an article entitled “8 Diseases That Give You Superhuman Powers.” Essentially, it was just a compilation of 8 different Discovery Health specials, with YouTube videos and Wikipedia references. It took about about 10 minutes to write, and it was online about a half hour after the conception of the idea. I decided to post the article on Reddit first, because it seemed that articles there were less easily buried. What happened was astonishing.
Daniel saw the article steadily climb the ranks in Reddit and more and more users gave it positive votes. He also submitted it to Digg and saw the same result. He shares a screenshot of his traffic chart:
But that’s not all the happened.
Webmasters of Popular Blogs Actively Monitor Digg and Reddit to find Interesting Articles to Share with their Users
As a result, Daniel started to see traffic coming in from a variety of top sites that picked the article.
As you can see, being on the top of Digg and Reddit gets you some serious traffic, but not just from those two sources. Not only did our page make it to del.icio.us popular, but it made it to the front of some very high traffic sites, such as Ebaumsworld.com and Gorillamask.net. As you can see, within five days, we received a total of almost 234,000 unique visitors. As it stands now, we are continuing to see traffic from sites such as ebaumsworld, although the main link is far from the front page. Additionally, we received significant traffic referrals from webmail clients such as gmail and yahoo mail, meaning our links were most likely being shared over email as well.
He shares his traffic sources in the pie chart below.
Result: 243,000 Unique visitors with just an hour’s work.
Is this easy to do? Here’s Our experience
When we launched this blog, we tried a similar strategy to rapidly build pagerank. We know the crowd on Digg and Reddit go for certain niche area topics, including
- liberal politics
- anti-religion articles
- international politics
- humor
- for some reason – cheesy pictures of cats
- technology news
- new science discoveries
- work, productivity and career articles
Sadly, Internet marketing was not one of them. So we decided to write an article that was Internet marketing related – but had a humorous angle to it too.
Our article was about using virtual covers to improve the attractiveness of digital products. It’s a fine article if you sell digital products.
But for 99% of the population – it’s pretty darn dull.
So we started our article with a story about how, while in Chinatown, I discovered an illegal DVD pirate who was using a “creative” way to sell more DVDs.
He would take a hit movie like “Good Night and Good Luck” (about American politics in the 60s) and “sex” it up with a virtual cover with better mass appeal.
Take a look below:
Actual Cover:
“Improved Cover” by Enterprising Chinese DVD Pirate:
We called our post “How a Wet T-Shirt can Shoot Up Movie Sales” and I submitted it to Digg and Reddit.
The Result
Within 24 hrs I had received 2000 visitors. Then something interesting happened. Webmasters of top blogs that scour Reddit and Digg for content started linking to my article. We got backlinks from Hollywood blogs, from Fark.com, even from the world’s top sex blog Fleshbot.com.
Within 5 days we received close to 25,000 visitors.
Not too shabby for a newly launched blog.
Now the downside:
We hardly made any money from this traffic. It was generic, untargeted traffic. Humor seekers and sex and movie fans. Not our target audience. We did get lots of valuable links from top blogs – but since these blogs were not in the same category as us (sex, humor and movies instead of internet marketing) the boost to our pagerank was good but not great.
Still – it was a fun experiment.
And to this day – the #1 keyword driving traffic to this blog is…
take a guess…
drum roll please….
“wet t”
So What Can You Do
You can start using clever articles to draw traffic from Digg, Reddit and Stumbleupon. But keep in mind that it’s a hit or miss game. Some articles with get your thousands of visitors. For Most – just a handful.
Certain niche sites will do well in this game. Sites that can target the categories I listed above. If you’re selling knitting items or window panes, there’s not muchy sensational stuff you can write to appeal to the Web 2.0 crowd.
But if you’re selling funny t-shirts, cool new tech gadgets, interview skills, productivity boosters, even cat food – start sending your articles to Digg, Reddit and Stumbleupon.
In my next post, I’ll discuss Stumbleupon. It works a little different from Digg and Reddit but can also send you massive traffic. Another post on this blog received 5000 visitors last month from Stumbleupon alone.
Note: Also – don’t forgot YouTube. The same principle applies, but using video rather than articles. See my earlier article on drawing traffic with YouTube videos >>
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