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Digg.com is known for it’s powerful digg effect. When your website hits the homepage of digg, thousands of visitors will come to your site and check it out. It’s always fun to see the traffic come pouring in and you feel good that your stuff is being seen. For the next few days, the traffic will continue but will be less and less each day. Before you know it, your 15,000 hits of fame are done and you are back to your normal traffic numbers.

What can you do to keep some of that traffic?

The secret is to treat these diggers different than you treat your regular readers. You need to present yourself differently to all of these first time visitors. Be sure they get a little note explaining what your site is about and point them toward some of your best work.

In a post on Seth Godin’s blog, he offered a good suggestion on how to do this:

One opportunity that’s underused is the idea of using cookies to treat returning visitors differently than newbies. It’s more work at first, but it can offer two experiences to two different sorts of people.

Does this work?

We thought we’d test this out on FreeMacBlog. Richard K Miller (another writer on FreeMacBlog) wrote a wordpress plugin called What Would Seth Godin Do. Once installed, “new visitors to your blog will see a small box above each post containing the words ‘If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!’ After 3 visits the message disappears. You can customize this message, its lifespan, and its location.” We installed this plugin.

In the last little bit, this blog has been on the homepage three different times. If you look at the traffic graph above, it isn’t hard to see where the digg traffic happened. After the first two times, the traffic came right back down to normal. The third time is different though. Just before the third digg traffic, we installed the plugin so new visitors would get a little message about the site. Notice what happened to the traffic after the rush. Rather than dropping back down to normal, the traffic only dropped a bit and has been holding steady ever since.

Conclusion

As Richard wrote on his plugin page, “New visitors will appreciate some context and background information about your site.” If you tell them why they should stick around…they just might.

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