In an earlier post I showed how Digg was good for short term traffic spikes, but StumbleUpon outperformed Digg in terms of retaining and building long term traffic for the average blog owner. One reader emailed and challenged me by saying “…Digg is always the best as you get more traffic… so much traffic that your server will crash…” Again, yes that’s true in the SHORT term, but you’ll garner much better LONG term growth with social media sites (such as StumbleUpon). Have you ever watched fishermen? It all boils down to the type of net you throw out (I allude to this later).

Side note: If your blog is hosted on a shared web server, there is a greater likelihood that your site will fail as the server may not be able to absorb the traffic load from Digg or Slashdot (and your hosting provider might suspend your hosting account). You’ll be happier with a dedicated server (as it’s more reliable and robust), or at the very least, a VPS should perform better than shared hosting.

However, let me illustrate by quickly grabbing 3 months of statistics for a specific post (off my Linux based blog).

The image below shows the total traffic to that page, and the referrers. If you click on the image, you will see the larger (readable) version:

The above shows three months of traffic to a page that was submitted to Digg and Reddit (on Feb. 28, 2008); whilst being saved to StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us. You’ll note that not very much happens until March 11 when I noticed in my regular web stats (AWStats) shows a larger amount of StumbleUpon traffic and then friends of those members started actively sharing the link to the post on April 19 (as it eventually filtered through to members who had larger StumbleUpon “followers”.

In retrospect, here’s the actual StumbleUpon only traffic for the same period:

Keep in mind that this is StumbleUpon traffic for all posts (not just the one that was originally submitted to Digg and Reddit). Needless to say, we could debate the statistics for hours and delve into more finite and custom report creation and filters – But that was not the excercise of this post.

What can we learn?

1. Think long term – Always. That will ensure steady growth.
2. Sites like Digg are a great tool for introducing your blog and it’s posts to a wide audience (casting the net).
3. Social media sites, such as StumbleUpon do a better job at attracting interested readers. (The fishing net has holes of the right size, so the fish you don’t want to catch swim through).
4. You can’t argue whether StumbleUpon is better than Digg or visa versa, because they do different jobs.
5. Each post on your blog is of interest to the specific niche for which it was written! This means that a post about newsletters (for example), will appeal to a different audience that your other post about web hosting. To clarify, visitors interested in learning what you have to say about one subject will not necessarily be interested in another post (on another subject). USe plugins to show “similar posts” to readers.
6. The home page of your blog IS NOT necessarily the primary entry page. (It’s not on my Linux blog; where the home page ranks in sixth place for popularity and entrance to the blog).

Conclusion?

Digg works with StumbleUpon, as I mentioned above, a good tactic is to use Digg as your introductory “Shout Box” and StumbleUpon as your growth “Engine”.