Hit by Del.icio.us Front Page Effect

Yesterday our popular article titled Absolutely Del.icio.us Tools hit the del.icio.us front page hotlist and instantly a traffic spike boosted my Sitemeter statistics. However, getting on the del.icio.us front page is different than getting on del.icio.us/popular. I elaborate the Del.icio.us Front Page Effect that followed.

Last time we hit the del.icio.us/popular, a stream of traffic followed from related services which index del.icio.us popular like popurls etc. which spreads the word to a larger audience and this is usually followed by a bigger the Digg effect and Stumbleupon effect.

This time the article was featured on the top of the Hotlist which lists what’s hot right now on del.icio.us, then gradually moved down the page over the next few hours.

A sudden traffic spike followed (which I track by hourly statistics) and the hourly traffic doubled for the next few hours.

How much site traffic came in from del.icio.us over the next few hours? Around 1500 visitors dropped by. There was no significant jump in daily income, as there were lots of del.icio.us tools to click around. There were a limited few backlinks that came in. Of course it was bookmarked and shared by a lot of users.

There was no slowness of page loading or web server issues, and pages were delivered as speedy as ever, courtesy Dreamhost webhosting (which I highly recommend too). Of course I could have started wp-cache to further ease the server load, till the wp-cache bug crashed the site, but it was not necessary.

I am still affected by the 405 errors with wp-comments, there were a lot of out clicks on
http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/wp-comments-post.php
but there were no change in the usual number of comments. I wonder what is up.

In Conclusion: Del.icio.us/popular is tracked by many more web services and you have a greater chance that the buzz spreads to Digg and Stumbleupon. Del.icious Front Page hotlist is a great place to get exposure, but the traffic ripple is limited to those few hours.