About three days ago, I got my first post, 101 Ways to Annoy Your Co-workers, onto the Digg.com home page. I’ve heard stories from people that say getting on the home page is a blessing and a curse at the same time.

Some of the positives are picking up incoming links, feed subscribers, and not mention a truck load of traffic. The big negative is the onslaught of traffic will most likely bring your site down when your post goes popular.

Here is the timeline for the events that took place on Thursday:

9:00 am: Published the post

9:30 am: Post was first submitted to Digg

11:35 am: Post was at 35 diggs

11:36 am: Emailed Dreamhost to give them a heads up of the server load

11:40 am: Post goes “popular” on Digg

11:41 am: The blog grinds to a halt from the traffic.

11:45 am: Dreamhost support thanks me for telling them about the expected surge in traffic and tell me the admins will work to quickly balance the load.

12:45 pm: Site was up but very slow.

12:49 pm: Dreamhost sent a polite letter to all the people on my server telling them that there is a site getting a lot of traffic and apologies for the slow load times.

Rest of the day: Watched the real-time stats.

As of late Saturday night, the post received approximately 31,505 views. Of these views 20,594 came from Digg, 3,242 came from StumbleUpon, 1,890 arrived from del.lico.us, and the remaining 5,779 came from other various sources.

Digg

Aside from getting on the home page of Digg.com, I was also on the home page of their Science section. The post achieved enough diggs to be visible on the “Top 10 in Science” section on the right of the page. I am convinced this drove even more traffic to my post as the digg fell down the page as others were made popular. So far, 1,406 diggs to the blog post and more a trickling in.

del.icio.us

I wasn’t confident that I would get any considerable traffic from del.icio.us. After all, I was going after the “humor” and “funny” tag, but didn’t think I had a chance to get on their popular pages. I was indeed wrong. The post achieved the front page of del.icio.us, the popular page for the entire site, as well as these poplar pages:

Fun - popular

Funny - popular

Humor - popular

Humour - popular

Work - popular

StumbleUpon

The post received some nice attention from StumbleUpon. I noticed traffic coming from there increase late on Thursday and then seen another spike on Friday. The surge in traffic was due to the fact that the post was visible on StumbleUpon’s Buzz page for humor. That is their version of what is recent and popular. The advantage of this having a post on these pages is that you can see how many “thumbs up” you received. Right now, there is 2,201 positive ratings.

Fark

I’m disappointed in Fark. I took the initiative and submitted the post myself, and it was rejected by the ones who moderate what goes onto the live site. About 50 referrals came from Fark.

Other sites

As the post became popular and other bloggers and site owners began linking to me and that is where about 22% of my visitors came from. Here are the top sites which sent me traffic:

PopURLs

Coolios

NetVibes

Admit-One

The Web List

Facebook

Incoming Links

I will need to wait a few more days to see, for sure, how many incoming links I picked up from this post. Technorati gives me an Authority of 81 and a rank of 53,128. Before the post, my rank was 101,495 so there was a considerable amount of inbound links added to get the ranking down.

It was very exciting getting on the home page of Digg. The amount of traffic was insane, and it was great to see all the comments pouring in. The post was my most successful attempt at link baiting. I have learned that I should contact my host even earlier if I suspect a post will be as popular as “101 Ways to Annoy Your Co-workers”.