When you create a new blog that is not associated with a well-known website, person, or company, it takes some work to get noticed. As much as we’d like to believe that simply submitting a website to a search engine will lead people to the site, it doesn’t work that way, at least not initially. Google and other search engines use a website’s age as one of the key weighting factors for search results in order to limit the impact of spam sites. That means if you want people to read your new blog, you have to do some virtual networking in the blogosphere. You have to lead people to the site and hope that word of mouth and inbound links will increase the visibility of your blog over time.

For Publishing Hacks, I’ve employed the standard tactics to increase my exposure by submitting the site to all the major search engines, claiming it in Technorati, and emailing influential bloggers that I thought might be interested in what I’m doing. This has generated a slow trickle of hits on the order of 50 unique visitors per day. I emailed the popular CBP email list, which generated quite a few hits over a several day period. Kathy Sierra later emailed CBP about my Engineering Amazon post and that resulted in a couple hundred more hits (thanks Kathy).

Another technique I’ve used to drive traffic to the site is submitting comments on popular blogs. I’ll either refer to something relevant on my blog or put the URL of my blog in the URL field of the comment. I’ve only done this a few times so far and while it doesn’t send a lot of traffic my way, it adds to the trickle. Interestingly enough, I commented on an O’Reilly Radar post and the comment never showed up. They have a system where first-time commenters have to be manually approved to prevent spam. They never approved my comment, which could have been an oversight or not, but I digress.

After seeing digg and del.icio.us links on a few other blogs, I decided to add them to each blog entry. Very few people were using the links so I started to digg my own articles in the hope that digg would generate a bunch of traffic. It didn’t happen. For each blog post I submitted to digg, I got under 10 “diggs” and fewer than 50 referrals. I’ve used digg for a couple of months and don’t find it to be a useful tool for generating traffic to this blog (not to say it hasn’t worked for other people). Digg has a limited number of categories and the best one that fits my posts is “technology“, which doesn’t really fit most of the time. It is odd to me that a social system like digg would rely so much on a top-down, narrow list of categories. “media” or “publishing” would be much more apt categories for me to use.

Enter reddit. I knew of reddit through my experience at Startup School. My general impression from what I read in the blogosphere was that digg was “better”. A friend of mine, Dharmesh Shah, started a blog recently called OnStartups around the same time I started Publishing Hacks, but he’s been getting a lot more traffic. (He has great content, which would be one reason.) We chatted the other day for the first time since we started our blogs and without even knowing it, we had used almost identical tactics for getting our blogs noticed. There were a couple of important differences though. He also submitted a comment on the O’Reilly Radar, but unlike my comment, his was approved. This sent a lot of traffic to his site. Someone later wrote a comment on the 37Signals blog that referenced Onstartups, which also generated a lot of traffic.

Another big difference was his use of reddit. Instead of using digg like I did, Dharmesh submitted his articles to reddit. He told me he received thousands of hits from reddit and some of his posts made it on the reddit front page.

I was a little skeptical given my digg experience, but I decided to try reddit out for myself. I submitted the Engineering Amazon and Stealth Mode Fallacy posts. Wouldn’t you know it, I went from having 50 visitors per day to over 750 for two straight days with all the new traffic coming from reddit. The Engineering Amazon post made it to the reddit front page for a short time and hung out on the reddit second page for the better part of two days along with the Stealth Mode Fallacy post.

You can see the impact of reddit with my Google Analytics stats:

My blog has been active now for about 2 months and digg has been responsible for only 8% of the traffic. Reddit generated 45% of the overall traffic in just a 3 day period! I’ve submitted approximately 15 posts to digg and only 2 to reddit.

Now that I’ve used reddit for the better part of a week, I can safely say I like it better than digg. Sure, reddit generated significantly more traffic to my site than digg, but I like the way it works better too. First, there is not a limited number of categories you have to pigeonhole your articles into. Also, there doesn’t seem to be as much noise on reddit as digg, which could be a function of the number of submitters. With digg, if your post isn’t dugg several times in a short period, it will quickly disappear. With reddit, my posts hung around the top two or three pages for a couple of days. Now don’t get me wrong, reddit isn’t perfect as Dharmesh pointed out, but at least for my purposes it seems to have the right mix of new article volume and quantity of users.

The general consensus is that digg gets significantly more traffic than reddit (although the disparity may not be that great). My general impression is that you’ll have a higher chance of being voted up on reddit which can result in several hundred or potentially several thousand referrals. With digg, your chances of being dugg are lower, but if you happen to make it to the digg front page, you could get a site crushing number of referrals.

As they are currently implemented, I think sites like digg and reddit become worse instead of better as more people submit articles. As article volume goes up, there is less time to read the articles and digg/reddit them before they age out. Reddit helps a little in this regard with their recommendation system, which provides another opportunity for new articles to be seen even after they’ve started aging.

If reddit had as many article submissions as digg, I bet it would face similar problems. It might be that more narrowly focused sites like the Kicks sites (e.g., googlekicks.com) are the way to go in the future. Either that or digg/reddit need to figure out how to make optimal use of categories so that they don’t alienate a whole group of content (like mine). Digg is working on personalization features that would compete with reddit’s recommendation system. It sounds like Rojo is getting in the game with some promising new features as well. Digg and reddit have had a lot of success in a short amount of time and fortunately for them, there is a lot they can improve to make their systems even better.

Ok, now for one last experiment. I’m going to submit this article to both reddit (here) and digg (here). This will be the first time I’ve submitted the same article to both sites at the same time. Given the subject matter of this article, I’d imagine the interest level to users of both sites should be similar. I’ll report back in a few days with an update on which site referred more traffic.