Last weekend I wrote an article describing my new social media toolbar, and why I was removing Digg from it. Firstly some background on why I made that decision:

1. My stats showed that no one was hitting the Digg button within my articles
2. My stats showed that only 0.8% of my overall traffic comes from Digg.

Based on those two clear facts, I took the decisions to remove the Digg button, much in the same way why I don’t show many of the other hundreds of Social Media websites – because they don’t drive traffic to my site. Simple as that, yes it doesn’t take up much real estate, and yes it’s no real bother to me, but its just pointless, absolutely pointless – so alas it is gone.

However, there is one clear way where Digg is driving visitors to my site which I cannot ignore, the ever raging Top 10, 20 , 25 best whatevers. Over the past 2 weeks 5 of my articles have been included in 3 separate articles from noupe, Smashing Magazine and currently, SpeckyBoy. All 3 of these articles have been received very well on Digg, some with over 1000+ Diggs which of course has had a knock on effect to traffic to my site in a very good way.

It’s a sad state of affairs when you think about it, it seems to require someone to sum up my work and others in a more digestible, dumbed down version in order to get coverage for programming articles – much in the same way as I have done for jQuery plugin developers with my Top X articles. I’m absolutely not knocking this way of doing things, I just think it’s surprising that this appears to be the one way smaller innovation or interesting articles are getting the coverage they deserve with the masses.

Being Realistic

This seems like the only realistic way that the content that I am creating will ever reach out to a wider audience on Digg and the like. I have tried with over 80 articles and received little response, yet when I become part of a Top X article, people are all over it. Strange behaviour and one which I am constantly monitoring to see if it changes.

All of this has started to make me think again about my decision around the inclusion of the Digg button. I still stand by my 2 points above as to why I have removed it, however when I see traffic from Digg hop-skipping into my site via a popular article, I have to ask myself whether it’s not a good idea to include the button. Therefore, in these cases where I am seeing visits indirectly from Digg users I am re-including the button on an ad-hoc basis to see if it makes any difference.

My gut feeling is that it will make very little difference to the impact of my articles directly on Digg, but I just can’t ignore the simple fact that the Digg audience are coming to my site, so there may be hope of some positive outcome as I’m getting far more eyeballs than I do by simply submitting to Digg every day.

I’ll keep you posted on how well it goes, it’ll be an interesting experiment, one I am sure you’ll be keen to find out the results for if you’re a techie blogger. Let’s work together and fight the power to educate!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 and is filed under Social-Web, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.