Last couple of weeks have been exciting at this blog as you all know with the Best 101 Lists making the front page of Digg as well as Delicious. A few friends asked how this whole experience was so here is what my state of mind was and some background leading up to it.
About a couple of months ago, I started writing an article and gave it a headline "Cooperation, not Competition, Leads to Success" and while I was still thinking how to give shape to my thoughts, I saw Maki's article Your Fellow Blogger Is Not a Competitor and given that his articles are always much more detailed and get a much bigger response from the readers, my idea of that post vanished because he covered more than I ever could. But the idea kept lingering in my mind because I was experiencing the support and cooperation on a daily basis from so many bloggers, be it in the social media scene or outside of blogging.
As I experienced more and more support from people blogging in different niches, with varied experiences, I continued to feel how fortunate I had been to be able to survive in the vast net of blogs these last six months, and that I wanted to write about it. My thoughts continued to jump from one aspect of life to another and I could never really bring a closure to this idea.
It was one of the those days when I couldn't really focus my thoughts and I started going through my delicious as well as Google bookmarks! As I was browsing through humongous collection of links, I noticed more and more lists I had been saving and an instant idea of sharing these came to mind! There, a new post, with not a lot of thought on my behalf, was born. It was during this browsing session that I had also come across Luciano's Group Writing Project and the idea of sharing this list seemed an easy and appropriate solution.
So, I published the list late night of Friday, November 23th, and Tad from onreact stumbled it the same day within a few minutes, followed by Simonne, Steven, AdTracker and Pelf, MzJade and the list of people thumbing it up continued to grow. I noticed that by Saturday I had 934 visits from StumbleUpon alone! That was amazing number of visits in just one day but by Sunday the traffic had died down to about 179 visits.
On Sunday night, I had been talking to Deborah from Life In The Fast Lane and asked her if the list post was digg worthy. Within minutes, Deborah had sent me the url of the post on Digg with a very nice catchy description. I was surprised to see about 4 Diggs in just a few minutes after it was submitted. I was really satisfied that in addition to some comments, it was also liked by a few Diggers.
By Monday morning, when I saw about 44 Diggs, I was pleasantly surprised. That is when I wrote to Deborah thanking her for the help and she gave me a bit of education that it was okay to digg and promote your own post once someone else had submitted it! There, I still need to learn so many unwritten rules! Of course, I dugg the post and also asked a few friends to digg it if they found it useful. I was amazed at how fast all of my friends came to support me. Deborah not only submitted it to Digg, she also sent it to Mixx. while Shankar bookmarked it on Delicious.
I had heard about the Digg effect but had no idea what it really meant, other than that the post was going to be seen by a lot more people than usual and that it brought lot more traffic than usual! But boy did I under estimate it's true effect! Underestimated BIG time because the traffic for one day was higher than many months together! See the images below. Some 15,000+ visitors in a short amount of time on Monday morning crashed the server for sure.
In this post, I not only wanted to give you guys a bit of information on how the numbers looked that day, but also take a few minutes to thank all those who supported me to not only digg, stumble and promote it on delicious and other smaller networking sites, but also supported me during the crisis when the server crashed and the 'account suspended' started displaying and left me a nervous wreck!
While Simonne sending me email "hope you make it Pearl", Jay, Chee Kui, Ken Xu emailing me with congrats and giving me the latest number of diggs on the article in real time, RT was suggesting that I needed to install WP Super Cache Plugin, and Aruni sending me pictures of how "ugly" the site looked while suspended and wondering who else were these diggers if not just the bloggers, Ram Karthik, Mayank, Nirmal, Kim, Anja and Colin, sending emails telling me how good the post was and that they dugg it or the post had reached the front page.
Mike Scott asked me if I needed any help and sent me a link to a post where Wendy talked about the cache plugin! Of course I didn't have the time to read the post because I was getting bombarded with emails that something needed to be done to get rid of bluehost's CPU error message so people visiting could at least see the content. Blue Host guys have been really good to me every time I had questions but this was a situation I guess they couldn't do much about! So I wouldn't blame them, it's expected with shared servers. Jay and Glenn suggested how I should de-activate the plug-ins, while Mig telling me this is why I needed to switch to THC lol
My thanks also go to all others who supported me that day.. too many to list here… check out, the post is at 700+ diggs and close to 600 delicious bookmarks! I didn't win Luciano's group writing project but the thrill was enjoyable and is something I think every blogger should experience at least once!
Here are some of those crazy (good) numbers that put 'a bit' of extra load on the server on Monday!
Alexa during Digg |
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Two days after Digg
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Note time Spent by Diggers is significantly less than Stumblers |
| Accidentally deleted Feedburner Feedsmith Plugin, causing subscriber numbers to drop :(
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Since then, these are the numbers:
11/27 1,779
11/28 730
11/29 to 12/5 450 on average!
The whole phenomenon reminded me of an article I had read some time ago at Copyblogger that "the spirit of cooperation is alive in the blogosphere" and People Really Want to Help You succeed!
Chris
It was an awesome list, glad to hear it got the attention it deserved.