I’m not talking about this blog (I’d love to have that kind of traffic) but I am talking about one of my other properties over at Area755.com

It was suppose to be an experiment that actually ended up being a very profitable site (made almost $500 in a month from what was suppose to be a test that made a couple of pennies, but was a “learning experience”)

What I did was programmed some algorithms that find some specific types of images and videos based on different content from different pages. (see our Cute Kittens and Cute Puppies Videos)

That was the easy part (let’s be fair, Even a 14 year old in india can make a functional website). The hard part with making money on the internet always is getting the traffic you need to really monetize what you’ve done.

My plan was to hit all the social network sites and make sure that the page are very google friendly (to get the SEO work eventually)

Well SEO work can take weeks or even months, but Social networks get you traffic at an instant, but not for long. (or so I thought.)

The experiment was a complete success. We did what we where suppose to. We got on digg’s front page, and we were very popular on StumbleUpon (most people on reddit yawned a little for it, but nothing from them)

But what happened, and whever did the traffic come from.

Digg sent some 120,000 unique visitors but after about a day it truly dropped to close to zero. (It alone made me almost $200 so no one is complaining, and on top of that it helps a LOT on my SEO work) But then came the StumbleUpon traffic, and you can’t beat that traffic because it’s constant and they seem to come and stay. StumbleUpon views should be quick and brief (after all they came to your page by no choice of their own, unlike digg users that WANTED to see what your page is) But the StumbleUpon traffic brings MORE traffic (each “I like it” click seems to bring 50 more users which obviously could bring 50 more each, and so on and so on. StumbleUpon traffic can be paid but the free traffic can’t be beat, And is worth every penny

Now to talk about how I made sure my blind luck in getting to the front page, and getting a lot of clicks on StumbleUpon multiply and continue bringing me 6000 unique users a day (on average)

We build all the pages on Area755 to link to each other (this is important because it keeps the viewers from leaving the site the moment they finish your one page. )
EACH page has a DIGG, and REDDIT button to submit each page individually to digg and reddit respectively.

As everyone knows your chances to get on digg’s front page is directly connected with how long you’ve been on digg and how often you’ve gotten one of your submissions on the front page. All it took is a very kind Digg user to submit a very Geeky page to digg, and for a couple of people to submit back to digg stating they liked his submission.

But I have to say we were slowly getting up to 75 diggs, and I noticed the traffic and went to the site and notice that the digg button was at zero. I had a mistake in my digg button code and the moment I fixed it it quickly went from 75 to 300 in a matter of 3-5 minutes. Then when it hit the front page it quickly (in an hour) reached the 1000 diggs.

What I’ve learned.

• Let other submit your articles to DIGG (unless you have a user that often gets on the front page with their articles, or get’s more than 30 diggs on a fairly regular basis)
• Make sure you have a DIGG button on your page so that DIGG users can agree that your link is good and digg back (most won’t click back and digg for you, plus they may have come from another site that shows links from digg’s front page so there’s no BACK to the page where they can digg)
• Make sure you digg button works.(If the digg button is created for dynamic content you might have some incorrect code that you won’t have to worry about if you do this manually)
• Don’t worry about that you are having 3000 diggs but only 13 reddit votes (reddit sucks!) and they’ll usually won’t vote. Want proof? Look at Reddit’s front page. Everything won’t get past the 500 points, look at diggs and on the front page things will get to 2000 - 3000 diggs.
• DON’T steal other people’s images (well if you do, don’t hotlink to them, download them and host them) I lost a LOT of traffic once ImageShack deleted several of the images that I was showing (HUGE DUhhh..moment for me!)
• SEND it to StumbleUpon yourself. (the first time requires you to fill in a form, and that should be you, cause most people won’t want to.

P.S. Did you notice that this blog front page of google when you search for “Damian“…
Now if I could only get on the front page for VIAGRA… Then those ads on the right woud REALLY pay well

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