Case Study: Digg vs. Copyblogger

Have you always dreamed about getting on Digg’s front page? Well, perhaps you should dream of being featured on an authority blog on your niche, instead. People have discussed widely the fact that traffic from social bookmarking sites is “peculiar,” but a couple of weeks ago I was able to track down the numbers.

Digg vs. Copyblogger

On June 18 I published the article “6 Foreign Expressions You Should Know.” It received almost 800 diggs, and it was also stumbled heavily. The result was a massive traffic, and a bump on the number of RSS subscribers, as you can see on the picture below.

Two weeks later, Copyblogger mentioned Daily Writing Tips on a post titled “Saturday Night Link Fever.” Judging by the picture, one could say that the Digg effect was much stronger, but was it really?

Analyzing the Digg Numbers

Digg sent over 20,000 visitors over the 2 days that followed. On monday, before the Digg front page, the blog was counting 647 RSS subscribers. The day after this number jumped to 857. Unfortunately, the next day the number dropped to 755 and kept stable at that level, meaning that the effective increase on the number of RSS subscribers was around 108.

Analyzing the Copyblogger Numbers

Brian published his “speedlinking post” on a Saturday, and maybe this influenced the number of visitors that he sent to my blog. A total of 400 visitors came from that link, 150 from the website and some 250 from the RSS feed.

The numbers are not even close to the Digg ones, but what happened to the RSS subscriber count? On Saturday, before Brian’s link, the blog was counting 910 subscribers. On Sunday it jumped to 967, and on the following Monday (which probably was still influenced by the link since many of his readers would not be reading the feed on a Sunday) it further jumped to 1025.

Conclusions

Only 0,5% (less than 1%) of Digg users subscribed to the Daily Writing Tips RSS feed, while almost 30% of the visitors coming from Copyblogger did so. Out of 20,000 visitors that Digg sent, 108 became RSS subscribers. Out of 400 visitors that Copyblogger sent, 115 became RSS subscribers.

Digg, Stumble Upon and other social bookmarking sites still represent the best source of raw traffic. Don’t get me wrong here, I do think the exposure you can get from those venues is simply amazing.

If you are trying to build a loyal readership and increase your RSS subscriber base, however, you should also focus on getting noticed by authority blogs.