You survived digg, now what?

The problem with publishing the most successful blog article of your site’s history is that you have to post another one following it. Where do you go from there?

Last night I went to sleep with 900 diggs, Google Analytics was showing 2,000 uniques (though it is a few hours behind), and feedburner was registering my norm of just over 100 subscribers.

When I woke up this morning we were on del.icio.us/popular, with 1300 diggs, 19,000 uniques, and nearly 900 readers. This is great, right? Sort of. Now we have to do it again, retain readership. But how?

Writing your next article

The problem with digg users is that they “hit it and quit it”, in other words they look at your site and leave. Most of them are not around for a long time. They see your content, read it, and go on to the next story.

The few that stick around will comment, or subscribe to your RSS. They are not loyal though either, they are waiting it out to see what your next post will be. If they like it they stay, if they don’t they’re gone.

Before when my site was dugg I had no idea where to go after the popular article. I thought I knew that digg community well enough to do it again, but I guess I was wrong, since yesterday was the last time I was dugg in months.

After you have created a popular post it is best to do as genie in Aladdin said “BEE yourself.” Your post made it on digg, do not try to make something that the digg community might like, because they won’t. If you write like you write you will be more successful than writing how you think they want you to write. (Did you catch that?)

Be active with your audience

Your new readers will learn a lot about you (the author) in your next few minutes, hours, and days. If you create a post that has a lot of people talking, but you do not chime in, then they are gone.

Readers like to get the personal feel when the author chimes in to comment like he is a normal guy. (Because you are, right?)

Make sure you don’t blow off your new readers, welcome them and keep the discussions going on your topic.

Show readers what you’ve got

Your new readers obviously like what they see, (they’re at your site, right)? So if they like your popular article they will more than likely like other articles you have written. But how do you show them?

I have a related posts plugin that I use, which shows posts that are similar to the post being viewed. This posts are then displayed in the sidebar.

You can also link your other articles to your popular article. For instance if I were writing an article about Apple computers, I could do a link about an article I wrote about Apple’s new iPhone.

Since your also active in the discussion of your article it is not bad to point readers to other articles or parts of your site within the comments. You would not want to use this tactic too much, but it can be used to keep your traffic moving around your site.

Handling the digg server load

Thankfully I have an awesome hosting company that was able to survive the server load. We never went down during our hardest hitting hours. It was the first time I was ever reading digg comments where someone didn’t post a “duggmirror.”

But, we did take the proper precautions though in case we were to go down. As many of your know, Wordpress powers this blog. So before the heavy traffic started setting in I backed up my database to my computer. We also downloaded a plugin that caches tech.zamwi.com to avoid it from going down. The plugin is called wp-cache, and can be found here.

So if you are expecting traffic you might want to be on a reliable host, backup your content, and cache cache cache.

Don’t be afraid

I was so worried after I got dugg about what the write next. How do you top your top story? The fact is that you have to drive on and continue producing good content. Remember “BEE yourself!”