On July 13th, for no reason at all, I decided to log on to Digg.com and update my profile. It turned out that July 13, 2005 was the day I had originally signed up on Digg, so it was my three year anniversary. That felt like a pretty lucky day to me, so I decided to post a couple of articles from my voice over magazine site, Voice Overture. That night I posted ‘Don’t Hire Your Family to Voice Over Your Video Game’ and ’5 Resources For The Pro Tools Beginner’ to the social news site and then thought nothing of it.

I woke up the next morning and it looked like ‘Don’t Hire Your Family to Voice Over Your Video Game’ had about 40 diggs. That in itself was pretty cool because before that I averaged about 15 unique hits per day and now with 40 diggs I had over 50 unique visitors to Voice Overture. It just gave me a three-fold increase in visitors with minimal effort.

Well, that was fun to see first thing in the morning, but then I was off to work and again thought nothing of it. After being in meetings all morning I decided to eat lunch at my desk and decompress for a little with some web browsing. I took another look at the status of the article on Digg and it was nearing 100 diggs, so I pressed my buddy to digg it to try and get it up higher. Lunch was over and now back to work.

It’s now later in the evening and I’m finishing up some work at home and again decide to take a gander at it and wouldn’t you know, ‘Don’t Hire Your Family to Voice Over Your Video Game’ was on the front page of Digg.com almost guaranteeing a plethora of hits to my site. All night I watched the counter go up. 100 diggs. 150 diggs. 200 diggs. 300 diggs. 400 diggs. This was so cool watching it in real time and just imaging my Google Adsense revenue clicking upwards along with my total number of diggs. I finally had to go to bed.

I woke up this morning, July 15th, to find that the article was now listed on the Top Contribution sidebar with a permanent spot on the front page. At 6AM EDT it had over 800 diggs. Wow! And again I’m watching that number increase all morning in real time where it eventually landed on the second most top spot.

I wanted to see how many hits I had from the previous night so I jumped over to my Google Analytics account. Before posting to Digg I received roughly 15 unique visitors per day. Taking a look at the numbers for July 14th I was blown away. 14,495 unique hits! The funny this is though, that only translated to about a buck and change in revenue and it will most likely cost a lot more in bandwidth due to the spike.

I’ve got to give credit where credit is due and Go Daddy, my host, held up awesomely during this influx. It got a little sporadic at the beginning but things mellowed out and there were no site outages.

As of writing this on July 15th ‘Don’t Hire Your Family to Voice Over Your Video Game’ has 1,269 diggs and over 4,000 unique hits. This was fun while it lasted and I hope to get a ton more readers out of this. Only time will tell.