Digg is known for being a powerful social force on the Internet. Besides that, Digg is also a great marketing tool - having your story reach the front page will certainty draw massive attention and bring tons of traffic to your site. The problem is that there are no universal criteria for articles/posts to definitely become popular with Digg community.

Design Interviews decided to do another express interview with web designers whose websites/blogs have been the sources for Digg's front page stories to find out whether or not targeting Digg was a deliberate effort of the author and whether or not they used techniques that they know tend to do well on Digg, and what the consequences were.

Our interviewees are:

- Jonathan Snook

- Mark Boulton

- Jonathan Nicol

- Alex Griffioen

- Joe Dolson

1. HOW DID YOU FIND OUT THAT YOUR POST BECAME POPULAR ON DIGG?

Jonathan Snook: I noticed it the moment I tried visiting my site and realized it had succumbed to the Digg effect and crashed (Six Keys To Understanding CSS Layouts).

Mark Boulton: I've been dugg a few times but Five Simple Steps to Designing With Colour was the last one. I found out because my traffic had gone through the roof.

Jonathan Nicol: It was when I suddenly started getting a lot of comments on The Visual Design Of Web 2.0. My blog had been fairly obscure until then, so I wasn't used to getting stacks of comments. Then people starting emailing me, asking if they could translate the article into Chinese or Russian, or just giving feedback.

Alex Griffioen: Haha. Well so far, I've only contributed links to stuff I built or wrote myself. Stuff that I know some people will find useful, anyway. That said, I tend to keep a close eye on the Digg count, to see how my efforts are received by the Digg community. My How to Make Sexy Buttons with CSS tutorial took some time to gain traction, but once it made the homepage, I checked the counter just about every minute.

Joe Dolson: I more or less followed A Redesign isn't About Design along from when it was submitted. The person who submitted it is a friend of mine, and once it was submitted I paid ccasional attention to how it was doing. When it hit the homepage, I was ready to take steps to stabilize my server and minimize any problems from the extra traffic.

2. WERE YOU PLANNING ON IT TO BECOME POPULAR WITHIN DIGG COMMUNITY?

Jonathan Snook: Yes, I specifically wrote the article to target the Digg crowd. After helping someone with a CSS issue, I was inspired to write a 'go to' post that I could point people who asked me questions that I answered on a regular basis. I took the article idea and put together the article using techniques known to do well with the Digg crowd, such as making the article easy to scan by including headers and lists and using a title like, '10 ways to?' or 'How to?'

.

Mark Boulton: No, not at all. I was just writing on a subject which interests me and I thought other people may find it interesting.

Jonathan Nicol: Not at all. I didn't submit the article to Digg, one of my readers did it of their own accord.

Alex Griffioen: Not necessarily, but those 15 minutes of fame sure felt nice. I'm not all that active on Digg, you see. I just think it's a very effective platform for knowledge sharing and blatant self-promotion. I'm not so much into the news and gossip.

Joe Dolson: Nope. Not at all. This was an article I wrote because I was frustrated with a project, and I certainly didn't expect a huge amount of attention to it! To be frank, there are things I might have done differently if I'd known it was going to be plastered with that much attention.

3. IF YOU WERE PLANNING ON IT, HOW MUCH EFFORT DID YOU PUT IN IT ? HOW LONG DID YOU WORK ON IT, HOW MUCH RESEARCH DID YOU DO, ETC.? COULD YOU MAYBE SHARE A COUPLE OF TECHNIQUES THAT YOU KNOW TEND TO DO WELL WITH THE DIGG COMMUNITY? IF NOT, WHAT DO YOU THINK WAS SO SPECIAL ABOUT IT?

Jonathan Snook: The article was written over the course of a couple days but probably took about an hour and a half to research and write. First, I determined the list of issues I wanted to address and then tracked down links that solved or explained those issues.

Mark Boulton: This particular article was well received because it was simply breaking down a subject into bitesize chunks. It was also presenting some complex colour theory in an accessible way. At least, that was the plan.

Jonathan Nicol: It was just good timing I think. At the time there was very little serious critique of the visual design elements that are typically associated with web applications. People recognized that there was a trend to use certain design devices, but my angle was to consider why those devices were successful from a usability perspective. There was a still lot of buzz about the term 'web 2.0? when I wrote the article, and I guess that captured people's attention too.'

Alex Griffioen: The only thing I spent some time on, other than the actual tutorial itself, was a headline that would grab people's attention. Watch Digg closely and you'll discover some unfailing headline idioms, like 'Top 10' and 'How to'. I went for the 'How to', added the completely inappropriate 'sexy' bit, and behold: here was a headline that had dozens of people arguing whether the 'sexy' adjective was appropriate, rather than discussing the tutorial itself. That cracked me up.

Joe Dolson: I think that one characteristic of the article which really appealed to the Digg crowd was the bluntness of the article and my own evident irritation. The article was a bit of a rant about incompetent design and poor business decisions - audiences sometimes like to read a good bitch session. Another characteristic was that I was arguing against the fairly common opinion that redesigning a website is about design. Strong opinions incur a lot of passion - and I certainly heard plenty of passionate responses on both sides of the argument! A lot of the comments I received were definitely not in agreement with me on that point.

But those who agreed with the article generally said they liked it because it really zeroed in on the most fundamental guideline behind a site redesign: that the site should fundamentally 'improve', and that this can't be judged on visual design alone.

4. HOW GREATLY DID YOUR TRAFFIC INCREASED COMPARED TO WHAT IT WAS BEFORE?

Jonathan Snook: It's hard to isolate Digg traffic and its effects on long term traffic trends. All signs point to it having little to no direct effect but indirectly, it creates greater awareness that often leads to more traffic from related sites like del.icio.us, Reddit, and the mass of blogs out there.

Mark Boulton: Hugely. I think it was in the region of one month's traffic in one day. So, about 40k unique users in one day which equates to about 120k page impressions.

Jonathan Nicol: Prior to being dugg, my blog got about 200 visitors a day. When my article hit the front page of Digg it peaked at 15,000 a day. The traffic spike dropped away quite fast, but I'm still getting healthy residual traffic a year later.

Alex Griffioen: There's no fair way to tell, because with the tutorial written in English and my website (blog) written in Dutch, I didn't bother linking my blog from the tutorial. The curious folks who did bother sniffing my domain were probably scared off by the alien language. Still, the Digg reference boosted my blog traffic by about 350% in May 2007 and even now my stats are up by 200% compared to months prior to the article. The tutorial itself was viewed 134,500 times the month it was posted.

Joe Dolson: It seems like it had an effect. It's difficult to pin down the actual causes of traffic increases, of course. The story went popular in the middle of May. My traffic increased about 35% between April and June, and has held pretty steady since then. The summer, however, is commonly a relatively slow period for web traffic. People are taking more vacations, spending more time outside on the weekends, etc. Whether this is true in the web design community?well, I wouldn't bet on it. I'll be curious to see what happens to my traffic in the fall, however.

5. WHAT ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF BECOMING POPULAR ON DIGG CAN YOU NAME?

Jonathan Snook: The advantage is the influx of readers. It hopefully leads to a larger following. The disadvantage is a little more troubling: the conversion rate is extremely low considering the overall number of visitors that pile through in the hours and days following a popular Digg. That combined with the often negative comments received from Digg users and the server issues that ensue make it a less than ideal way to increase awareness.

Mark Boulton: The major advantages are some longevity for your article - I still get the odd user coming over from Digg, and perhaps some people who may find your blog interesting but had not been to it before. The disadvantages are the trolls. A word of advice ? if you get dugg, don't go there and read the comments unless you have pretty thick skin.

Oh, and if you're hosting the website on a shared server which charges for bandwidth, or processor load, then be careful. The first time I was dugg, my site went down after about an hour because there was some throttling on the domain. The second time, it cost me about £60 in additional bandwidth charges.

Jonathan Nicol: The advantage is obviously increased readership and profile. I am still approached by startups who want a 'web 2.0' look for their site, and came across my article. But they never have any money! The biggest disadvantage was that I felt pressure to replicate the success of the article. It took me about a month to calm down and get back into the flow of writing regular old blog posts again, without agonizing over whether they were as good as the one that got Dugg.

Alex Griffioen: When you become popular with a tutorial like this, it's very rewarding to see people gratefully applying what you've taught them. I also like to think Apple.com's new 'sexy' top menu was inspired by my tutorial, since they launched their redesign shortly after my tutorial made the Digg homepage :) Another, more practical, advantage was the free Coda license I got for voluntarily endorsing the software. That was great fun. I wouldn't know of any cons, but I'm sure I would have if the linked page were database driven. Many sites can't seem to cope with the massive influx Digg is known to cause.

Joe Dolson: Exposure is probably the biggest advantage. The immediate exposure to 10,000 plus Digg visitors is pretty beneficial. Whether they agree with you or not, my personal 'mindshare' increased pretty rapidly because of Digg. The link factor is pretty insignificant, on the whole. Although that article now has quite a lot of inbound links, many of them are very weak. The article is probably my most scraped page, for example?

There are only two real disadvantages to becoming popular on Digg that I can think of. The first is the server capacity issue. If your server can't take the influx of traffic, you're not really going to benefit in any meaningful way. Instead, you'll have a very frustrating period of massive site errors.

The second is a major disadvantage for anybody who is, shall we say, sensitive to criticism. The Digg commenters can be pretty harsh. I know that some of the comments left about my article were distinctly brutal - sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly. But you need to have a thick skin if you're going to deal with Digg.

Personally, after the first half a dozen comments on Digg, I just didn't read them anymore. Didn't see any benefit in it for me.

THANKS, GUYS, A LOT FOR SHARING YOUR EXPERIENCE AND TIPS WITH US!

However, this time the interview doesn't end there. Having interviewed the guys, we thought we would rock the Digg community with next time we post an interview following the tips given, and would then publish this interview with DI being the fifth interviewee in it.

The post that was planned to be a ginnypig in this experiment of ours was well-known by the majority of you Web 2.0 Quiz. Fun and entertaining, yet believable and rewarding, the quiz perspective to become popular within Digg community was rather promising. But it only got 22 diggs at the end. Yet the reverse to become famous on Digg doesn't mean your material is condemned to a failure everywhere else.

Failing in reaching the Digg front page, Web 2.0 Quiz got to the tops of Infos-do-net network and won the hearts of StumbleUpon members bringing us so far 9, 561 and 3, 030 unique visits respectably making it for 15, 591 in two weeks!

Did we follow any algorithm? Not at all! Submitting We 2.0 Quiz to StumbleUpon 'just in case', we didn't even expect such enthusiasm. And Info-do-net members got a chance to get their Web 2.0 Degrees due to one of their colleague member's post. We didn't even know such a network had existed!

Technology and web design communities are rather unpredictable, and one can never know where his/her work will find appreciation. Pure luck or carefully planned strategy a little bit of both would never hurt. One thing that's a 100% true is that interesting content will always find its readers!

Helen Walker

Helen Walker graduated with a degree in Mass Communications and Sociology. She worked as a newspaper journalist for two years after that. Having always been interested in cyberculture and its impact on society, Helen switched to online journalism and joined Design Interviews blog in July, 2007. Ever since she's been interviewing web designers and administrating the blog. Helen is a keen movie-goer and she is also a panda lover.


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