Digg Reality

I thought that if you read my post An analysis of Digg numbers against visitors, you deserved a rest and a little laugh. Have fun!

An analysis of Digg numbers against visitors

Is there a relationship between number of diggs and visitors?

I recently created two posts that I pushed onto Digg. The two posts are in many ways quite different. One was written over several days and required quite a bit of research and the other was written in about 10 minutes or less while watching TV.

The first one BlogCatalog social networking strategy so far has received 11 diggs (the most I ever had) and attracted so far 16 unique page views. The other one was Amazing Flickrvision 2D/3D Flickr mashup so far has received only 2 diggs but attracted 41 unique page views.

Bizarrely the BlogCatalog post didn't receive a single visitor from Digg at all while the Flickrvision post received 19 unique page views from Digg. Clearly there is something rather odd in this.

The average time on page is very revealing. On BlogCatalog social networking strategy visitors stayed an average of 3 minutes while on Amazing Flickrvision 2D/3D Flickr mashup the visitors stayed a mere 1 minute and an half. The bounce rate is also very revealing. The BlogCatalog post bounce rate a little below 20% while the Flickvision bounce rate is over 70%.

There is about 15 news in Digg that include the term "Flickrvision". They have between 1 to 8 diggs. There is about 20 news in Digg that include the term BlogCatalog (a few of them relate to a newer press release from BlogCatalog). They have between 1 to 35 diggs.

Is there a relationship between number of diggs and visitors? I am not too sure this is an easy conclusion to make. I feel that the front page effect must be the main factor responsible for the rush of visitors from Digg to my Flickrvision post. That would explain why the BlogCatalog post didn't received visitors from Digg. It must have failed to make the Digg front page. But then what about the Digg upcoming page?

Finally using my little SEO plugin (see Great SEO FireFox plug-in by Aaron Wall), I can see that the Flickvision homepage as about 50,000 links (Yahoo search) while BlogCatalog homepage attracted more than 1,200,000 links (Yahoo search). Clearly there is today far more people interested into BlogCatalog than Flickrvision.

In conclusion, I believe timing is key in Digg. Being the first to digg on a new upcoming topic and making the front page must be of upmost importance to drive some of that Digg power juice. Also, writing real contents increase vastly your chances to retain some of the visitors you worked so hard to attract to your posts.

Blog activity report: Sunday 27th of May 2007

Past:

• On the 26th of April, I decided to push one of my post "Are venture capitalists all sharks?" to social networks, it didn't work, only 3 visitors,
• On the 14th of May, I have posted a piece about BlogCatalog social networking strategy which has attracted quite a few diggs (11 so far), it attracted no visitors from Digg but quite a few people from the BlogCatalog crowd read it,
• On the 20th of May, I posted a little post on a new Flickr mash-up which actually attracted quite a few visitors from Digg (about 50) despite having just 2 diggs,
  
• On the 28th I setup my Google Analytics so that it gathers all the data from my sub-domains separately as well as together in one profile: not a complete success (see).
  

Future:

• I need to investigate a spike in my ProLight blog. It has reached 29 links in Technorati and attracted temporally quite a few visitors: 6o visitors on Sunday the 22nd which is quite a lot more than usual,
• I need to analyse the 2 posts that I recently dugg to understand why some brought so many visitors and the other none while the numbers of diggs went the opposite,
  
• I need to investigate my Google Analytics settings, the weiersmuller.org profile, it does not show the pages from all the sub-domains as I wanted.
  

How to add a Digg button to a Blogger post

I was struggling this afternoon attempting to integrate the Digg button in one of my post. Eventually I got sick of it and posted on BlogCatalog my dispair. Very quickly borzack put me on the right track:

Blogger doesn't allow the script tag if i'm not mistaken. Here are a few help:

• DiggButton
• Tips for new Bloggers

I used the first link as I don't digg all my stories and don't want to cluter them to much. I think it worked see BlogCatalog Social Networking Strategy.

If anybody feels generous enough to click and digg my story I would really appreciate. I would of course return the favor as soon as you've got your button working ;-)

Thanks a lot to borzack and Diggbutton,

Kind regards,
Marc.

Great SEO FireFox plug-in by Aaron Wall

Aaron Wall from SEOBook has written a great little plug-in for Firefox that pulls together lots of SEO data and display in the Yahoo and Google search page results. You can basically check out your competitors ranking on various search engines and social networking or bookmarking tools very quickly: really cool!

Check out his great selection of free SEO tools don't forget to read Aaron SEO Book to learn the best SEO technics.

Thanks a lot Aaron.

How to post video on your blog

Just go on YouTube copy and paste the embed URL in a new blog post, press publish and your are done. For instance see the embedded music clip below:



(PV) YUI - CHE.R.RY - Karaoke playing for us

Big thanks to Moe

BlogCatalog social networking strategy

I took part into a Technorati experiment a little while ago (see Do you want to take part in a Technorati experiment). It is now time to take part in a BlogCatalog experiment.

Don't wait any more time go through the list and start lobbying the people you like.

As a new blogger in a very crowded blogsphere, I struggle to push my voice out there and fail to grab some of these juicy Internet links. As such BlogCatalog is an easy way to increase your traffic from fellow bloggers. All you need is to have a few posts and a bit of history then you can register your blog.

When you have done so, you will see some curious BlogCatalog users popping in. Then you can start networking with your fellow BlogCataloguers and market your blog(s) to them. Don't forget that when you visit a blog, you then become visitor of that blog and will be listed on the BlogCatalog recent viewers widget possibly exposing your blog(s) to ever more people. Also don't forget to be polite and thank your visitors to entice them to come back.


However you must have a good strategy. Don't just go random that is time wasting: think ... then think again. Basically you need to scan through BlogCatalog users to find people:

• with same tastes as you so that they and their readers read your blog(s),
  
• with lots of inbound links (or contacts) so that you get some of that juicy traffic,
• and finally friendly enough to reply or link back to you (or add you as a contact) so that you increase you ranking.
  

Ranking is visible in BlogCatalog on the users profile (see mine not so good). That is all nice and good but surely you don't want to scan the 1000's of users to find out the right people. Well, that is where you need to be clever. Just ask Google magic search engine, basically type this in Google (if you are down right lazy just click the link below):

"site:http://www.blogcatalog.com/user/"

What you get is the list of BlogCatalog profile ordered by ranking thanks to the Google magic. That means very likely the profiles with the highest number of inbound links (not quite sure as the Google magic is kept secret and we can only speculate about the recipe). You can also add specific search keyword(s) like photography to find like minded people. Although this does not mean number of contacts that should list the profiles with the most external visitors. Anyhow that's the job done.

This strategy will maximize your return on investment and make you more visible in the Internet space (more specifically in the BlogCatalog sphere). Of course it is a little hard work and to make sure it is worth your while, why not calculating your return on investment and let me know how you are doing:

"ROI = number of inbound link(s) gained / hours spent networking"

Notes: number of visitors is less relevant as they tend to vanish quickly, inbound links get you new visitors for ever. I thought I would use minutes but I think we need to be reasonable here one new inbound link per hour is pretty good.

Don't wait any more time go through the list and start lobbying the people you like. Don't forget to tell me how it goes by posting a little comment about this strategy!