Two weeks ago one of my posts made it to the front page of Digg, and it gave me a massive boost in traffic. Being a geek what I found more interesting than the tiny elation of “they like me, they really really like me!” was the bigger picture:

• How did I get to the front page of Digg?
  • It was a howto on a subject a lot of people find interesting — synchronizing calendar/contact information.
  • It was already the #1 traffic generating post on my blog.
  • Started with lifehack.org, then lifehacker.com, then the front page of del.icio.us, then got picked up by one of the top posters on digg.
• What is the significance in terms of back-links, increasing Google ranking, and increased page views over time?
  • Social networking sites can bring a massive amount of traffic in a short period of time, but what do they do to your long term traffic?

Related Posts

• The howto on ScheduleWorld that got Dugg
• I Digg It - Week 1
• The perl script I use to generate the tables/graphs in this post

A Note on Data

One small handicap I’m facing (other than whatever mental handicap makes me pay attention to this stuff) is the available statistics. I only have the WordPress.com 7 day referrer log available to me. The referrer logs remove search engines and RSS feeds as sources of traffic. But that’s ok, because what I’m mostly interested is what sites people who read the article are coming from.

It’s the second week, does anyone still care?

I thought traffic would drop down to average (1200-1400 page views a day). Instead it’s held steady at 2000-4500 page views a day. This was because of other big sites coming into the picture like googlesystem.blogspot.com and downloadsquad.com. But aside from the ScheduleWorld post I had a pretty good week with getting at the head of joel.reddit.com for a while, and getting a lot of traffic to my WordPress Theme Review series.

What surprised me is that I’m still getting a good amount of traffic from digg. The del.icio.us traffic has really dropped, which goes to show that you’re either on the front page of del.icio.us or you’re no one.

There was a major jump in Technorati rating because of all this.

The ScheduleWorld article currently has 130 blogs linking to it. Only a few of the blogs have enough readers to generate any kind of noticable spike in traffic.

• lifehack.org
• lifehacker.com
• googlesystem.blogspot.com
• downloadsquad.com

The “long tail” theory as applied to blogging doesn’t seem to be holding true. Either most blogs don’t have significant readership, most people don’t click on links in blogs, or blog content goes stale so fast that once you are off the first page it’s all over. It may be that the numbers per day are too small, wordpress.com doesn’t seem to track referrers in the log with less than 4 clicks a day.

The Numbers

Site	Day 1	Day 2	Day 3	Day 4	Day 5	Day 6	Day 7	Totals
del.icio.us	17	22	0	10	12	9	0	70
digg.com	26	13	25	129	113	74	87	467
lifehack.org	22	13	14	20	18	35	43	165
lifehacker.com	41	23	19	29	27	31	18	188
long tail	8	0	19	34	163	56	14	294
normal traffic to article	127	70	69	192	204	182	141	985
other articles	138	68	52	50	47	431	247	1033
stumbleupon.com	5	9	0	0	0	7	0	21
techmeme.com	4	0	8	0	0	0	4	16
furl.net	0	0	5	0	0	0	0	5
chris.pirillo.com	0	0	0	36	16	18	13	83
googlesystem.blogspot.com	0	0	0	176	158	50	8	392
downloadsquad.com	0	0	0	0	534	216	51	801

Intermission

The Referrers

del.icio.us	70	http://del.icio.us/ http://del.icio.us/ericfaris http://del.icio.us/morten http://del.icio.us/popular/gtd http://del.icio.us/redchia
digg.com	467	http://digg.com/search?s=scheduleworld http://digg.com/software/How_to_synchronize_Outlook_with_Google_Calendar_Gmail_iPod_others http://digg.com/software/page3 http://digg.com/software/page4 http://digg.com/view/all/popular/thisweek/page6 http://digg.com/view/technology/popular/thisweek/page3 http://digg.com/view/technology/popular/thisweek/page4 http://digg.com/view/technology?s=sync&a=30
lifehack.org	165	http://lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/how-to-sync-outlook-with-gcal-and-gmail.html
lifehacker.com	188	http://lifehacker.com/?refId=201091 http://lifehacker.com/?refId=201192 http://lifehacker.com/?refId=201323 http://lifehacker.com/?refId=201375 http://lifehacker.com/software/gmail/ http://lifehacker.com/software/google%20calendar/ http://lifehacker.com/software/google-calendar/ http://lifehacker.com/software/syncing/ http://lifehacker.com/software/syncing/sync-outlook-with-multiple-personal-organizers-via-scheduleworld-201190.php
long tail	294	http://adrian.warnock.info/2006/04/how-to-use-new-google-calendar.htm http://bitelia.com/ http://blog.muehe.eu.org/?p=108 http://blog.outer-court.com/forum/68327.html http://coolthingoftheday.blogspot.com/2006/09/sync-outlook-with-google-calendar-and.html http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=462692 http://garyfeng.com/wordpress/index.php?tag=ppc http://itpro.no/art/9523.html http://morgat.blogspot.com/2006/09/google-calendar-sur-outlook.html http://motoricerca.net/ http://motoricerca.net/archives/2006/09/26/sincronizzare-outlook-calendario/ http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2006/09/18/synchronizing_g.html http://solsie.com/ http://spratmedia.pbwiki.com/Walkgood http://superdeluxe.ch/ http://superdeluxe.ch/news/639/lesestoff-kurz-und-schnell http://tech-tag.com/category/google-calendar/ http://wmugperu.org/blogs/cfong/archive/2006/09/19/Como-sincronizar-todo-con-todo-_3A002900_.aspx
normal traffic to article	985	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Code http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScheduleWorld http://grinn.net/blog/dev/2006/04/incorporate-google-calendar-into.html http://scheduleworld.com/tg/syncmlInfo.jsp http://tinyscreenfuls.com/2006/04/first-one-to-get-google-calendar-to-sync-with-outlook-wins/
other articles	1033	engtech.wordpress.com/tag/nokia-6682 http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/09/how_to_use_digg.html http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/09/the_art_of_dist_1.html http://blogcritics.org/2006/09/21/091233.php http://board.progaming.it/showthread.php?t=56539 http://gigaom.com/2006/04/12/google-calendar-almost-there/ http://joel.reddit.com/ http://joel.reddit.com/goto?id=k0a9 http://joel.reddit.com/new http://programming.reddit.com/ http://programming.reddit.com/new http://randsinrepose.com/mt/rcom.cgi?entry_id=426 http://techcrunch.com/2006/08/17/create-an-api-for-any-site-with-dapper/ http://technorati.com/search/www.waxy.org%2Farchive%2F2005%2F03%2F30%2Fwordpres.shtml?sub=toolsearch http://wordpress.com/ http://wordpress.com/blog/2006/09/20/new-theme-day-dream/ http://wordpress.com/blog/2006/09/22/new-theme-rounded/ http://wordpress.com/blog/2006/09/25/kubrick-custom-header/ http://wordpress.com/forums/topic.php?id=4164 http://wordpress.com/forums/topic.php?id=4164&replies=1 http://wordpress.com/forums/topic.php?id=4164&replies=2 http://wordpress.com/tag/lastfm/ http://wordpress.com/tag/pressrow/ http://wordpress.com/tag/scheduleworld/ http://wordpress.com/tag/tinymce/ http://wordpress.com/tag/vistaprint/ http://wordpress.com/tag/windows-genuine-advantage/ http://wptheme.wordpress.com/
stumbleupon.com	21	http://stumbleupon.com/refer.php?url=http%3A//engtech.wordpress.com/2006/08/11/the-holy-grail-of-synchronization-how-to-synchronize-microsoft-outlook-multiple-locations-google-calendar-gmail-ipod-and-mobile-phone-with-funambol-scheduleworld/
techmeme.com	16	http://techmeme.com/
furl.net	5	http://furl.net/furledPopular.jsp
chris.pirillo.com	83	http://chris.pirillo.com/ http://chris.pirillo.com/2006/09/25/syncing-outlook-os-x-google-with-ease/
googlesystem.blogspot.com	392	http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/ http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/09/synchronize-your-calendars.html
downloadsquad.com	801	http://downloadsquad.com/ http://downloadsquad.com/2006/09/26/syncing-ms-outlook-with-google-calendar-and-gmail/ http://downloadsquad.com/page/2/

But where are the pretty pictures?

They aren’t pretty, but here are the graphs. Not quite the same high as the week before with the 2000+ referrers in one day.

Related Posts

• The howto on ScheduleWorld that got Dugg
• I Digg It - Week 1
• The perl script I use to generate the tables/graphs in this post

Wow, that was kind of… dry

Here’s a video of Paris Hilton singing Happy Birthday to Hugh Hefner in her underwear.

I *highly* recommend turning off the volume.

I was pretty surprised to find out that you can still get hits being on page #5 for the Google search “paris hilton sex tape”. Usually it’s nothing if you aren’t on the first page of search results.