Learning from my Digg Effect Failure
Earlier this week I wrote a post on the “10 of the most annoying things about the iPhone 3G“. Having written an article on the Top 10 things I liked about the iPhone 3G and having a bit more time to play with Apple’s new wonder, I thought I’d give a rounded view to someone interested in buying the phone. Before I knew it, I had hit the 1000 word mark, which is quite long compared to my average blog posts - normally around 100-200 words. I was passionate about the topic, which most of the time reflects in one’s writing and ultimately positively affects the overall feel of the post.
Minutes later, domfosnz, an active Digger, submitted it to Digg. Through the magic of promotion and networking, it slowly garnered enough votes to make it popular enough for the front page. This took around 200 Diggs to get there. I’ll write more on methods to get website pages front-paged in the weeks to come as I have only been active on Digg for a month and still experimenting.
What is Digg?
For those who don’t know what Digg is, it is one of the world’s most popular social-bookmarking sites where users can ‘digg’ (positive vote), ‘bury’ (negative vote), comment and submit website pages. Logically, the website pages that attract many diggs in a short period of time are deemed as newsworthy and propelled to the front page (sometimes referred to as “fp”) of Digg.
How many users does Digg have?
Two sites estimate (listed in ref below) that Digg has over 2.5 millions users; you can imagine the amount of traffic a website would receive even if a small subset of the total Digg population visited a front page Digg story.
This is the Digg Effect : the massive wave of visitors rushing through the internet to check out a freshly front-paged website link, where most of the times, even the most robust servers crash. A website can receive between 20,000 - 100,000 visitors within a couple of hours. To many, having this amount of traffic is both a dream and a nightmare.
Yes, My Server Crashed
To be quite honest, I thought that my website was sturdy enough to handle the Digg Effect. I have a dedicated web server (my website is the only one on the server), dual quad-core Intel processors and 2GB of RAM and SCSI drives hosted by one of Australia’s premier web hosts. Yet, if you read halfway through the first set of Digg comments, you’ll see people complain that my website was pictureless and the Digg mirror site kicking in. This is the point where my server crashed.
Digg Effect statistics
As for the number of visitors I received via Digg, it ended up being close to 35k new visitors. Around 30k more than my usual daily traffic.
What I’ve Learned from the Digg Effect:
1. Diggers don’t click on ads as much as my usual traffic: I predominantly use Google Adsense ads on my site and normally pull in around $10 a day. On this particular day, I ended up with around $14. This shows that Diggers are usually more focussed on reading the content to which they were directed to rather than be distracted from ads.
2. Need to install some form of caching for Wordpress: there are a couple out there but WP-Cache seems to be the one of choice. This makes static versions of pages which eases up the load on the servers which would normally have to perform queries to present blog pages which are database driven.
3. Be ready for a barrage of comments from Diggers: some are applicable however there are many that aren’t. This is the Internet and you’ll get passersby who don’t even read the post in it’s entirety and make random remarks. Most important thing to remember is don’t take it personal. Be happy that you received more traffic that will have good long term benefits such as more incoming links to your site and more exposure.
4. Always do spelling and grammar checks before publishing: I do this most of the time, but I forgot to do it for this one as I wrote it quite quickly in between meetings. Always, always do a spellcheck and get someone with superb editing skills have a readthrough. I deserved all the flack I received for the minor mistakes I made.
Surviving the Digg Effect
For those who think that they’ll experience the Digg Effect soon or want more ideas on how to better prepare for it, read Ivan’s excellent article entitled “Surviving the Digg Effect”.
Digg Effect References:
- How Many Users Does Digg Have? #1
- How Many Users Does Digg Have? #2
- What is Digg?
- About Digg
- What Digg Means for Servers
Popularity: 45% [?]
Mr.Gadget Live Ustream.TV Show July 28/7/08
In this show I talk about the Altec Lansing Nobi Portable Speakers, 10 most annoying things about the iPhone 3G and the Sumajin Headphones!
Join me every Monday 8:30pm AEST!
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/mr.gadget-live
Popularity: 32% [?]
The Perpetual Website Enhancement Cycle
One of the key indicators of a website’s success and its ability to generate income is the amount of targeted traffic it receives. What is targeted traffic? This refers to the traffic you receive that is related to the niche or market your website is aimed at. For example, if your website is about horses for the purposes of selling horse products and gadgets, getting traffic from people doing searches with the keyword “dogs” on Google will be of little value. If you don’t know what the aim of your website is, please take time to do this now.
My Mr.Gadget website is aimed at selling gadgets in Australia. If you do a search in Google for “gadget australia”, you’ll see we are (hope we still are at this time of reading) number one for this search result. This took many months of research, tweaking and hard work.
In order to increase your targeted traffic you need to understand what keyword, websites, sources are bringing you in traffic. Based on your understanding of this, you can then tweak or optimize your website to attract even more traffic and therefore increase your website revenue. Ka-ching!
Coming from an IT background, I like to break things down into simple forms to understand a concept. Understanding your website traffic is part of what I like to call the Perpetual Web Enhancement Cycle. This is a structured process flow that describes the installation of a metrics tool through to highlighting the re-iterative nature of website tweaking. I believe that all successful websites follow this general flow with some modifications here and there.
Here is the Perpetual Web Enhancement Cycle presented in a flow diagram:
Step 1. Install a Website Traffic Analytic Tool
Like any close friendship, you need to spend time and effort getting to know your companion so you can truly get the best out of each other. This is exactly the same with your web traffic. How does one do this? First things first, install a website traffic analytic tool (WTAT). As the name suggests the primary role of this tool is to gather information on the traffic that comes in and out of your site.
Popular Web Traffic Analytic Tools To Try Out:
- Sitemeter (Using this now for 2 sites)
- Statcounter
- Google Analytics
- Urchin
- AWStats
Step 2. Burn in WTAT for 30 days
Once you’ve found a tool that you like, give it 30 days to gather information on your website. Most of them will ask you to install a script on each page to trigger data collection so make sure you follow all the prescribed steps. After 30 days, you’ll have a workable data set.
Popularity: 55% [?]
Another Arnold Aranez iPhone 3G Video
My friend Chris, who was also camped the iPhone 3G with me, sent me this video that features us (later in the video) talking about the things we were looking forward to in the iPhone.
For those impatient to see me in 6 layers of clothing, tired due to 45 minutes of sleep and sipping on a large latte, zoom on down to 2:43 of the video!
In case you missed it, here’s the article that I wrote on the Mr.Gadget website that talks about the 10 things I like most about the new iPhone 3G.
Popularity: 42% [?]
New Version of Wordpress (2.6) Now Available
If you are considering starting up a blog, I would highly recommend that you use Wordpress. It comes with everything you need to start a blog and is expandable with the options of adding widgets and plugins. I started using Blogger 5 years ago and just moved to Wordpress in December 2007. Since then my traffic has increased as was able to apply more SEO (search engine optimization) techniques to my Wordpress blog than Blogger.
A new version of Wordpress has just been released today. So whether you have an existing blog or commencing one, make sure you update/grab this version from the Wordpress Website.
The main enhancements of Wordpress 2.6 are:
- Ability to use previous versions of draft posts/pages
- Improved “Press This” button functionality: allows you blog on other web pages quickly and incorporate their images and text.
- Inclusion of image captions
- Preview themes before your audience does
- Gears functionality: caches image and CSS files on your PC for faster performance when writing
Below is a video of the changes in Wordpress 2.6:
Wordpress is a great blogging foundation. We’ll write more on growing this blog and optimizing it for search engines in the upcoming posts.
Popularity: 38% [?]
The Day I Camped for the iPhone 3G and Got Famous
I never expected getting the iPhone 3G would turn out to be so much fun. Nor did I expect to receive my 15 minutes of fame on the day. Looking back, I’m glad that I did it and enjoyed the cold night/morning with the friends I made.
Here’s what happened on the day I camped for the iPhone 3G.
(Yes that’s geeky me in the photo)
Thurdsay 10/7/08
12pm: Heads down to Melbourne T-Life Telstra Store to get iPhone 3G lowdown; confirmation of pricing, availability, when the store would be open and estimated amount of stock. My friend Chris and I were convinced that there would be some if we got there by 6am, which was the opening time.
5pm: Finished work. Head home to let wife know that I’m definitely getting an iPhone and attempt to convince her for the last time, that my current phone (iMate Ultimate 8502), was the best thing since sliced bread and she should consider using it…I fail. Regardless, I was determined to try out Apple’s new baby.
8pm: Prepared clothes for cold wintery Melbourne night/morning. Five layers including thermals. I wanted the iPhone but did not want to get sick. Sleeping bag was found somewhere under the stairs, and quickly found itself in my car’s passenger seat. Considered wearing my headlamp but shuddered at the possible ridicule from those less-geeky.
9pm: Heads to Bunnings after realising the wait would be way too long to be sitting on fridge-cold concrete for 8 hours. Finds a perfect foldable lounge chair and decides that $49 was a small amount to pay for comfort and increased chances of sleeping given the ability to fully recline.
Popularity: 65% [?]
Is it worth submitting to DMOZ anymore?
Another step that I do with all my websites (out of habit), is to submit them to DMOZ Open Directory Project (ODP).The DMOZ crew pride themselves on a high quality web directory that is maintained by thousands of ‘expert’ volunteers all around the world. Each site is scrutinized to ensure that it is worthy of inclusion then with equal meticulousness allocated to an appropriated category. I was a volunteer editor for a year or so and I can tell you first hand that each site is dealt with great (almost too much) seriousness.
Back in the day when sites like Excite, Alta Vista and Lycos graced the echelons of search engine supremacy, being in the DMOZ directory was fundamental for any website looking to be included in their search results. Even Google superimposed DMOZ listings in its searches.
Popularity: 39% [?]
Submit your URL to Google to appear in Google searches
It’s a sad fact that many beginner bloggers / website owners think that once they’ve created their beautiful website, their piesta resistance, that hordes of visitors will bombard their site. Unless you’re an already famous entity on the web scene this will, for the majority, not be the case.
One step in getting your site more traffic is to ensure that it’s indexed (recorded) on the world’s most used search engine - Google. Being number one for your chosen keywords in a Google search is another story which I will cover later, but at least this will notify Google that your site is ready to be crawled and listed.
Google Crawl Explained
What is “crawled”? Google sends out a virtual bot that moves through all sites that are indexed in its database. This crawler tracks updates and captures information on new pages. The frequency of this crawl is dependent on the prominence / popularity of your site i.e. the more popular you website the more frequent the crawlers visits. For example, my gadget store gets crawled at least once a day and is a top 50k ranked Alexa website. This means that my new pages will reflect in Google searches within 24-48 hours.
Popularity: 43% [?]
Tips on Choosing Your Domain Name
One of the first steps to getting a website up and running is choosing your domain name.
Good domain names are those that, once rolled off the tongue, immediately conjure up images or associations to your products / services or blog. For example, when someone says the word “Google” we think of Internet search engine. Granted, they’ve spent millions and millions to build this brand however the word “Google” as a domain name was a good foundation.
Imagine if they started with “GooglePen.com” - I know it sounds ridiculous but I know there are people out there creating domains that confuse rather than assist their potential customers’ imagery.
Here are some tips that I’ve learned over the years regarding choosing a domain name:
1. Determine what your brand is: What exactly are you representing or trying to sell? Make sure that your domain reflects this. This is what you will be known by and known for.
I chose my name for my domain because I didn’t want to confuse any of my current readers with another brand/name. Many people on the internet know me as Mr.Gadget so if I used a domain such as www.arnmeister.com it would give me another identity.
Popularity: 40% [?]
Welcome to Arnold Aranez Dot Com - Post #1
Hello, welcome to my website, Arnold Aranez dot com.
The purpose of this website is to give my readers information on how to create and maintain your own money-making blog. The best way of showing you this is by creating this very site and sharing each step of the way. My goal is to have this site earning at least 5 figures in advertising revenue, like my other website, Mr.Gadget Australia.
Why not just talk about this on Mr.Gadget Australia?
The Mr.Gadget website is primarily a gadget online shop and a tech blog second. I didn’t think it was appropriate to be discussing how I talked someone into an advertising deal there. This website also follows in the footsteps of great money making bloggers such as Darren Rowse and John Chow.
More than just Blog Money Making
However, further to discussing money making ideas for your blog, I will also be sharing some tips / advice for starting your very own web store. My online gadget store, Mr.Gadget has turned over $5 million in the last 5 years with little seed funding so I believe I’ve got some words that may be of interest to those starting their own webstore venture.
It’s all about the Readers
In business, the customer is king - very similarly with blogs I believe that the reader is king, so if there is anyway that I can improve this blog to make it more readable, more interactive or appealing please let me know. I am a very to constructive criticism. Also if there’s anything you’d like to hear about please send me an email to aa@mrgadget.com.au.
Thanks for stopping by and now let’s get this show on the road!
Popularity: 26% [?]
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