MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

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 »

Last 5 posts by

• Do you think SEO in other lan­guages is eas­ier? — Sep­tem­ber 18th, 2008
• Google Slap — How to recover from a Google Slap? — Sep­tem­ber 8th, 2008
• What Does Your Order But­ton Say? — August 29th, 2008
• Will Knol Rule The Search Engines? First Analy­sis Indicates…It Just Might — July 23rd, 2008
• Are small busi­nesses drop­ping out of AdWords? — July 23rd, 2008

About the Author

Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype. Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.

Check out other posts by Mike Reining

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