Riding a Digg.com wave
This has been a most interesting month, with spikes of traffic coming from BoingBoing.net, an iTunes featured listing and now, a Digg.com listing. Well, sorta. The BoingBoing story was all about us, as was the iTunes feature. But the latest traffic, this time from Digg.com, wasn’t even about us. Allow me to explain.
Yesterday afternoon, a blog post popped up on my radar that showcased 40+ audio books available in podcast form. OK, but that pales in comparison with the 84 we have here at Podiobooks.com, so naturally I investigated. The page in question linked, as far as I could tell, only public domain books and most of them housed by the fine people at Librivox. But it wasn’t a post that said “hey go check out Librivox”. Instead, it gave individual links to the books, sometimes straight to the iTunes music store listing for the podcast.
The post mentioned that the list of books would grow, so I posted what was at that time the only comment, asking the author to consider posting a link to us here at Podiobooks.com. (Note: This has since been accomplished.)
And that’s when things got interesting.
Over the next hour, more and more blog posts came to my attention, all of them linking back to this same post. Naturally, I was puzzled. I mean, 40+ free audio books in podcast form is nothing to sneeze at, but it sure seemed like a lot of attention was being paid to this post — a lot more than I had previously seen paid to posts about free audio books in any form. Puzzled, I began to dig deeper, determined to find out why this seemingly innocuous story was spreading so fast.
And then I found it. The story had been listed on Digg.com. More importantly, it was getting an incredible amount of diggs! (Note: Digg is a social new site. Anyone can post links to stories and the Digg community collectively decides what is important.) I’m still unsure what happened to make this story get such attention. The user who posted it has had his Digg account for only 10 days and has not built up a huge list of posts or friends.
But no matter, because there has been an unexpected boon. Because I was the first person to post a comment on the original post, and because a lot of other folks on Digg are wondering why this story is so important and are checking out the comments, (and now because they’ve listed Podiobooks.com as well) we’re getting a significant amount of residual traffic — both from the Digg-boosted page and from within the comments on Digg itself. For the last two days, more people have found out site from that page than from any other source, including Google.
So a special thanks to the person who wrote the posted then put it up on Digg.com. You may have neglected to put us in your list, but the residual benefits to us have been great. Let’s hope some of these new visitors stick around and check out a few of our titles!
