To Digg or not to Digg for traffic?

Is sending a post to Digg a good idea to promote your website or is it good to kill your server ?

A question I crossed a few times since a week or two on several forums I attend. Basically I was the one triggering this since I posted 2 articles to Digg. I wasn’t send to the spam corner pfffff Was already happy and… I didn’t kill the server neither, meaning I got traffic but low… good or bad ?
I ended with 4 times more traffic for 3 days before it dropped back to normal and also 2 comments in a blog entry. Overall I’d say it was a positive experience. But is it an experience to renew ?

What to do now? I started with searching on Digg’s huge index for some replies and found this in a post :

Here are some of the things that the Digg community considers spam:

* Old news
* Repeated stories that keep on getting submitted, such as “iPod Spoof Commercials”.
* Stories that provide basic information such as “How To Increase Your Blog Traffic”.
Although many of these types of stories hit the Digg front page, a lot of diggers hate them
and are making noise about them by marking them as spam, or even emailing the Digg staff.
* Stories submitted by website owners.

Right, I’d better not start again according this story to prevent me from being yelled at and banned in the end. I won’t add this story but if someone else does ? Can I be blamed ? I just wrote this on my own blog as a reply to some questions I got.

Another post relating an article release regarding their website was Dugg and Deliciously eaten. It confirms basically what I experienced. A traffic peak (they weren’t as lucky since the server couldn’t take the sudden traffic) and then quickly back to normal.

What would my conclusion be :

If you’re lucky to be Digged and not labeled spam, you get a traffic peak. But it will rapidly disappear. Does it leave any returning traffic ? Good question I can’t answer honestly. I don’t think so since my forum didn’t get a single new member that period. I did get some blog comments but I’m not sure the one who did post came back since. All in all you create a traffic peak (in worst case you even crash the server and if you’re just an account user, the server admin might be just a little unhappy with your stunt ) but no regular visitors. If you want to continue, you need to write article after article and hoping someone diggs it for you (or risk to be banned).. but what will you write after a few days ? Or you end like so many others, news chaser and hope to be the first to break the news ….

I added Digg’s feed to a news reader and followed (or better said tried) the flow. I haven’t done any statistics but the number of ‘genuine’ written articles is low, extremely low. Most are taken from a wide panel of news sites… and then you get them all in a constant flow, all brought into one channel.

The 2 posts I made were basically very different, one about some terminal hack for OSx (basically copy pasting someone else) and one about spam (that was one I made from scratch with material from my experience). The one about the terminal hack got me most traffic, 23 times more to be precise. And I was expecting the other way… the original content would be better…
With this I don’t say Digg is useless, crap or low level. I won’t pretend such a thing since their huge success proves there are many out there loving it, and happy to use it. But according me it isn’t the best channel to promote your website in the long run. I think the more conventional seo tools will bring you more constant traffic and people looking for a solution to their ‘problem’.
Digg is a news channel with an option you could label as democratic, the majority decides what will be front news. Digg is not a promotion channel for websites, products, even if by occasions it does, but I’d label that as secondary effect and absolutely not it’s goal.