Chris Brogan, a social media maven, has published an article on his blog that goes into detail about his experience with the so called “Digg Effect“. Chris provides a visualization which shows the surge in traffic he received when he reached the Digg front page. What happened as a result? According to Chris, NOTHING. His RSS subscriber base didn’t increase, nor did the initial traffic to his site which is the basis for this post. Bloggers and site owners alike believe that getting on the front page of Digg is like striking gold, unfortunately this is not the case.

I’m not saying that being on the front page of Digg is a bad thing, but there is something you have to realize. The type of traffic that Digg sends is the “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow” type of traffic. And while were talking about this sort of traffic, the same thing can be said for Stumbleupon, Sphinn, and Propeller. I’ve read so many blog entries that covered their own surge of traffic and the similarities between all of them are the same. No one sticks around, no one subscribes to the RSS feed, and the site that was once popular ends up returning to the shadows of the web.

A blogger or site owner should be looking to grow their reader base and that won’t happen by getting on the front page of Digg or any other major social bookmarking site. There is the argument where if you appear on these sites multiple times, there is a more likely chance of gaining quality traffic. I wouldn’t consider the digg effect to be called quality traffic, but I do think that by receiving this fly by night traffic, your building brand awareness. Your brand being your site and it’s a golden rule that REPITITIVENESS works.

The gist of what I am trying to say is to not rely on Digg, Stumbleupon or any other website to provide you with traffic. Instead, write good quality content. Good quality content does the job of so many other facets of blogging. Good quality content creates links, conversations, interactivity, spawns relationships, builds your brand and does so many other positive things for you, that if I were to write a book on SEO, it would contain one page. That one page would simply say, WRITE QUALITY CONTENT.

Tell me what you think in regards to this issue. I’d be very interested in your opinion.

BTW. Hello to all of you STUMBLING across this post. Are you here to prove me wrong?