Webmasters Are Stumbling Over Digg For Traffic
A 2 week Study of Traffic with Digg up Against StumbleUpon For Internet Traffic Leaders
By : Brent Jankowski

I've been a Webmaster for a long time now.  There are certain things you start to realize with trial and error that are not common knowledge, especially on the internet.  It's interesting that where information is at everyone's fingertips thanks to Google and Ask as well as Wikipedia, there is still room for experience to give you a leg up on the competition.  The entire SEO ( Search Engine optimization) field is built on the experience of webmasters like myself who have and do try everything under the sun to get higher rankings as well as traffic.

The Digg Effect
We've all heard of the Digg effect,  where at it's best you could get a traffic explosion that throws your Alexa ratings through the roof.  I have experienced it many times for different clients or interests. A number of times for my own sites as well. But I also submit or have submitted hundreds and hundreds of links around the net on a weekly basis.  After doing this now for quite some time I can give you this little study I did comparing Digg and StumbleUpon as the heavyweights, and one upstart I call Stumble Junior, aka EarthFrisk just to show numbers.

When you look into the data you can clearly see that having a hit with Digg is like a brief internet lotto, but those hits are few and far between.  I had one article that a month ago got a client 87,320 hits first day in Digg! But I made maybe 700 plus submissions to Digg to get  this.  So indeed the Digg Effect is truly like winning a brief one or two day internet lotto. We all want to win the lotto don't we?

The Devil though is in the Details

StumbleUpon is the clear winner in more ways than one.  The people who use SU seem to be far more loyal to the site than the Diggers as of late.  You can look at raw numbers with the charts below to see exactly what I mean.  Digg is wonderful for that lotto hit, 1 out of 700-800 for me. But on a daily basis, the true traffic champion is StumbleUpon.

Here is a chart I made to illustrate the real worth of StumbleUpon up against Digg.  I will not give actual links as I do not want these sites banning my various 'alternate personalities' that we webmasters know we must have.

What I did was from Monday October 1st 2007 to Sunday October 7th, I tracked 10 articles submitted and what the result was for traffic. The results are surprising to those who haven't done mass submissions or have the experience. 

Note: Submissions were on various topics ranging from blog posts, politics and funny videos, too animals, marketing articles and products.

For pure traffic StumbleUpon is the King.   Six month old EarthFrisk impresses me far more for consistency and traffic  than Digg does.  Digg Traffic doesn't impress me unless I get that grand slam homerun.  More and more that is getting  harder and harder to do.  In the 10 articles I tracked for this study, StumbleUpon wins 7 out of 10. Digg won only one day. EarthFrisk took 2 days!

StumbleUpon Rules for Traffic

The King Though and looking to be champion for some time is Stumbleupon.  A receptive audience and growing in number every month.  Plus you don't need that 'Digg' effect to got some of the best traffic on the net.   It seems to do better than any site where you can submit at will to that is free.  In fact what occurs with SU is more traffic in the following weeks, although greatly diminished. With Digg you get that climax then the quick decline to 0.

Consistency is important for steady traffic and nothing tops StumbleUpon!  Even Stumble Jr ( Earthfrisk) outperforms Digg on a regular basis.

The newer EarthFrisk, which was started in June, still is in Google's and other search engine sandboxes (term used by Google and other Search Engines that describes period before they start ranking them, as well as them getting pagerank in the case of Google). They should have pagerank  sometime late November if it holds that new sites are still given pagerank by Google after 6 months.

Why I include an upstart like Earthfrisk is for reference.  If a new site that is still in the sandbox  can outperform the mighty Digg nearly for every submission, then we merely need to adjust our submissions. This is all I am saying.

Conclusion

Making submissions to the social bookmarking websites and social networking and media sites are extremely important to help your website traffic with the least (time) investment as well as cost.

You can build a quick presence for your website in no time and get lots of traffic, which in turn will help you to get better advertisers.   Know that the internet moves fast but anyone can create a network that can explode your traffic.  It is an investment in time though so knowing what sites do the best for you is very important for your marketing.  

Next article: Twitter and PerfSpot and Facebook, Oh My!

If you would like to get a copy or are interested in some other tips you can send me E-mail me at bondjamesbondster@gmail.com  .

Reference
StumbleUpon   http://www.stumbleupon.com/
Digg.com   http://www.digg.com
EarthFrisk   http://www.earthfrisk.com