Preparing your site for a Digg

I finally got one of my sites Dugg. I’ve had sites get traffic spikes from sites like Reddit, but Digg is a whole new ballgame. It didn’t go as well as it could have, because I thought I was prepared, but I was wrong. Here are some things you need to know if your site hits the front page of Digg.

• If it hits Digg, it may hit Reddit and other sites capable of sending 20k or more.
• My traffic storm took almost 250 GBs of bandwidth – well beyond what my hosting package allocates (no, they didn’t suspend me, but they are going to charge me overage fees – ugh). I’ll be moving a batch of sites to a reseller package on HostGator soon that has 250 GB. If a swarm starts, I have time to upgrade the package, if I think that may be necessary, before a suspension happens.
• If you have any inkling this might happen – like, if you wrote a linkbait post – make sure any affiliate links relevant to the post are in there from the get-go. In my post, everyone wanted to know where I got a particular product, and it hadn’t even occurred to me to get affiliated with the seller of that product. I think I could’ve made quite a few sales had I done so. Now I’m still waiting for the company to approve my app.
• Get your stats together. If you want to be able to track it with Google Analytics or a third-party stats package that’s better than AwStats, don’t delay having that in place. If your AwStats only updates once a day, like most hosting packages do, you can get 80k new visitors before you even realize anything’s happened. (And the first 10k show up within the first half-hour – that’s how fast it moves.)
• Use caching software, reduce php calls – anything you can do to minimize how much your site uses in server resources. I left this one for last not because it’s the least important, but because it’s been covered a million times in other “How to prepare to get Dugg” articles.
• After the Digg event is over, one of two things will happen. If your site already has a loyal user base and/or plenty of articles or something that makes you look like a keeper, your traffic will NOT dwindle down to the numbers it was attracting before Digg – you’ll gain some new regulars from that traffic swarm. But if you don’t have a lot of articles, or your articles (aside from the linkbait) aren’t very impressive, or you don’t have evidence of other people hanging out at your site, your traffic will dwindle considerably. Mine’s still falling – I’ll let you know when it bottoms out, and how that compares to the traffic I had before Digg.

1. Project Mai Tai – Digg Traffic
2. My first attempt at a Digg post
3. Surprise site earnings
4. Shameless Plug – vote for my post on Digg
5. Does Digg play fair?

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