Zen Zoomie’s Place: Chronicles of a (Wannabe) Pro Blogger

If you read the last three articles in the How the Great Blogs Began: The First Posts series, you probably noticed that most of the 15 blogs profiled had significant "spikes" in their Alexa traffic ranking at various points in their life. In most cases, traffic drops back off after the initial spike, but it normally levels off higher than it was before the spike. If you guessed that those spikes were frequently caused by the Digg effect, you’re right!

One case that really jumped out at me was JohnChow.com. Let’s take a look at a graph of JohnChow.com’s Alexa daily reach again:

This looks like a pretty good place to start "digging" for gold. Alexa has been kind enough to tip us off that John Chow obviously did something very, very right in September, 2006. Before that, his blog had plugged along with only moderate increases in traffic. In September 2006, his blog’s popularity shot up like a rocket. At the peak, he was able to increase his daily reach by nearly 1600% in one week! Even more importantly, when the dust settled after traffic died off a bit, John was able to maintain the majority of his momentum and continue increasing his traffic.

John Chow’s monster boost in traffic came from doing one little thing—he got Dugg. Not once. Not twice. John got Dugg six times in one week. How on earth do you get Dugg six times in a week?? Here are John’s posts that got Dugg that week:

1. Sep 18, 2006: Great Parking Job! Did You Do It? (509 Diggs)
2. Sep 18, 2006: You Know You’ve Been Dugg When (19 Diggs)
3. Sep 19, 2006: Making Money With Your Mortgage (276 Diggs)
4. Sep 21, 2006: Using Life Insurance to Shelter Income (185 Diggs)
5. Sep 22, 2006: Trading Hours for Dollars (433 Diggs)
6. Sep 25, 2006: The Internet’s Biggest Google Whores (1,602 Diggs)
   (Note: Dates are dates that the posts were Dugg, not originally posted)

The post that started it all for John Chow? It’s a commentary on the auto-parallel parking system of the Lexus LX460. A random musing turned gold. And John was ready to pounce and take full advantage of the situation…leveraging the massive traffic to get even more Diggs in the next few days. By the middle of this week, JohnChow.com was getting more traffic every day than the entire prior month!

Party’s Over

The Digg party didn’t last forever for John, as he soon attracted the unwanted attention of some diehard Diggers that didn’t think he belonged there. On November 24th, 2006, he got himself banned by Digg after having his site’s posts reported as spam one too many times. Although the ban was removed in February, John hasn’t had much luck with Digg since due to changes in the way Digg automatically kills posts that it thinks are being promoted by groups of people (like JohnChow.com readers).

The lack of the Digg Effect since December, 2006 makes it even more interesting that John has steadily increased his traffic through most of 2007. I can’t wait to explore some more.

Until next time,

ZZ