Five Tips For Surviving Your First Front-Page Digg

The goal of many webmasters and website owners is to be on the front page of Digg.com.

Not only do you receive a MASSIVE amount of traffic over a short period of time, but you will also pick up an insane amount of valuable one-way links that will propel your site higher in the search engines.

One of our sites was featured on the front page of Digg.com last month and the benefits have far outweighed any potential short-term headaches.

However, if we hadn't acted quickly and been on top of our game, our site would have certainly crashed and we would have missed out on many of the benefits that we received as a result of our site actually staying up during the avalanche of traffic.

Here is a small list of tips that will come in handy if you find yourself on the front page of Digg:

1. Develop a good relationship with your web host. Make sure that your web host is very responsive to your emails and offers 24/7 support. This will come in handy when you find yourself on the front page of Digg. If your web host doesn't respond to your emails within a half an hour or doesn't have phone service, move somewhere else. Quick response time on the part of your web host is imperative to keeping your site up during a full-scale Digg attack.

2. Monitor your traffic. Check your stats from time to time during the day. See where your traffic is coming from. If you notice a burst of traffic, investigate. Find out where it is coming from. With Digg, you will first be listed on a subpage (in say, the Digg technology section), and then if your article is Dugg enough, you will find yourself on the front page of the site. Normally this takes an hour or two to move from a subpage to the main page, in my experience.

3. If your article is receiving a large amount of Diggs in a short period of time, contact your web host. Tell them you are expecting an avalanche of traffic, and to keep your site up at all costs. Even if you have to pay for extra bandwidth, trust me, it's worth it. A front page Digg can literally make a site. In our situation, our web host took off all of our traffic and data quotas, and our site remained online for the most part.

4. Monitor your site closely when you are on the front page of Digg. Little things can go wrong and take your site down. In our case, we had too many MySQL connections at one time. A web host can fix this problem quickly, but only if you are monitoring the situation closely.

5. Capitalize on the momentum generated by this Digg, and make sure that you add plenty of useful content to your site over the next week or so. You will have many repeat visitors during this time, and now is the time to convert some of them to loyal readers. If they see that you post regular, quality content, they will keep visiting.

Filed under: Making Money Online | General Knowledge