Well, I didn’t expect to make enough to quit my job already, but I’m definitely off to a better start than I could have hoped for. I’ll call this step one to escaping job hell. The outcome being that I was able to make over $800 and get over 30,000 unique visitors to one of my sites in just over a week.

How?

Digg.

I’ve been reading digg for quite a while, but just recently I’ve begun to realize the 800 lb. traffic generating gorilla it really is. Get the front page of digg, and you’re guaranteed massive amounts of traffic. I got 30,000 hits in a week from one article. And it wasn’t even that great of an article. That’s the power of viral marketing. Here’s what I did:

On one of my other sites, the main focus is posting weird and interesting stuff that pops up on eBay. Up until recently, I would just troll the movie memorabilia and “Everything else” sections looking for screwed up stuff that people were selling. I made a pittance from affiliate income, but mostly just because I really couldn’t generate much traffic. Then I wrote an article about mystery auctions. It went viral. I’m still getting a couple diggs a day weeks later. All I did was write the article, laden with affiliate links to ebay auctions, then linked it on a bunch of social bookmarking sites:

delicious, technorati, reddit, stumble, clipmarks, magnolia, and finally digg.

It hit the front page. My server went berserk. I called my hosting company and upped service to have more simultaneous incoming connections. I installed wp-cache. And digg was still killing my server. Once it calmed down, though, I looked at my affiliate stats. 72% CTR on 30,000 hits.

This resulted in over 500 ebay sales and 5 new ACRU’s. Now I just need to extract the winning formula from this experience. I realize I wasn’t even remotely ready for this much traffic. Next time, hopefully it’ll be even better. Wow. Now imagine if I write a good article.

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