Blake Schwendiman's Blog and Blook

Übergeek warning: this is all nerd- and blog-related material. If you wish to keep your geek level low, please read this instead.

Recently I wrote about the effects of Digg and Reddit on blog traffic. It's been about a week since then, so I thought I would follow up. Check out the traffic pattern (click to enlarge):

The first spike is the day that one of my articles hit the front page of Digg. The second spike is when I hit the front page of Reddit. Interestingly, my traffic dropped back to pre-Digg levels immediately after the aforementioned Digg event. Post Reddit, though, my traffic has not returned to its pre-Reddit levels.

As mentioned in my previous comparison with Digg and Reddit, I do have to say that the post that hit Reddit's front page was much more relevant to the topic of this site, so perhaps the Digg visitors were only interested in the immediate topic, but were turned off by the general purpose of this blog.

Since my initial experience with both services, I've had a tough time finding anything that did particularly well on either site. Even similar types of articles on both have not had any significant impact. I would say that may be due to the fact that the same core users don't want to continually see the same types of things.

So, my overall assessment:

• Pick Digg or Reddit based on the relevance of your article to the readership of the site. If you don't know what the readership likes, spend more time looking at what does make it to the front page.
• If you want a blip of traffic, post a relevant article on either Digg or Reddit.
• If you want a long-term change in traffic, post an article that is both relevant and in harmony with the overall theme of your site or blog. If you normally discuss technology, then posting a technology article on Digg will be more likely to draw readership long term. However, if you normally blog about bacon, and also know what a computer is, if you post your once-in-a-month technology review on Digg (or Reddit), don't expect the people to suddenly become interested in bacon and return to your site on a regular basis.
• Don't pretend. If your site is about bacon and you post an article entitled "Cold Fusion Discovered" that actually points to a recipe for Bacon and Grape Nuts, expect your post to die in a flaming fireball.