Charl Norman

I published a blog post yesterday on BandwidthBlog aimed at generating traffic from social bookmarking site’s like Digg and Delicious. I wanted to tap into the ‘list link bait’ success so I combined the Digg communities love of photos with the list blog post concept and a popular buzz word at the moment -web 2.0- the result - The offices of today’s leading internet companies

I planned to submit the post around 9pm +2GMT when the Americans started waking up - by then Digg would be serving peak traffic and I would’ve managed to get 30-40 votes from my Digg friends which would lead to the post appearing in the “hot upcoming” area.

Unfortunately, I made a mistake by submitting the post to Muti and my Twitter followers which led to blogger, Paul Jacobson, picking up on my post and submitting it to Digg. This wasn’t a issue as the article still made it to the Digg homepage. But initially I was pissed as I had a top 10 Digg user linedup to submit the article which would lead to Diggs in the beginning.

Around mid night +2 GMT the post reached the front page of Digg and within two minutes about 8000 people navigated to bandwidthblog - this was very resource intensive and eventually took my server offline for two hours. I tried prepping for the “digg effect” but to no avail -

Digg effect is “the term given to the phenomenon of a popular website linking to a smaller site, causing the smaller site to slow down or even temporarily close due to the increased traffic.”

Next time I will be ready after reading these resources -

• WP-Cache plugin
• Dedicated box

Here is some ‘digg effect’ tips and info

ReadWriteWeb - Digg effect
Surviving the digg effect | creativebits
Wikipedia entry
High traffic tips for WordPress
How to prep for the Digg effect

Here is some ‘link bait’ and link building tips

From the Filthy Linking Rich to the Art of Link Bait | Threadwatch.org
Link Building for New Blogs
SEO Advice: linkbait and linkbaiting by Matt Cutts
Making Link Bait Work For You | WebProNews
5 Link Baiting Methods - Blog Tips by Tihomir - Make Money Blogging

Screen shot of my post as it hit the Digg homepage

The post on my delicious - saved my 19 people so far