Exactly one week ago The New Business Blog was up on the homepage of Digg thanks to an article written about how impossible it was to get up on Digg’s homepage.  It was definitely unexpected and certainly not unwanted, but what lasting effects has it had on my site?

In terms of traffic, I’m still getting more hits than usual, however it’s pretty tough for me to gauge how much of this is residual Digg traffic.  From August through the middle of March, I had essentially stopped posting on The New Business Blog for a couple of reasons, namely I was focusing on other sites and I was coaching a basketball team and the Digg article was only the eighth post since I “rediscovered” posting on this site.

That being said, on Sunday and Monday I saw a huge spike in visitors (ended up being over 35,000 hits) and have seen the numbers continue to fall throughout the week, back down to about 300 or so.  Certainly I would have liked to see the number stay above 1,000 hits, but I wasn’t expecting many people to hang around.

In turn, I haven’t seen a dramatic increase in Adsense earnings.  It’s pretty well known that getting up on Digg’s homepage will bring a rush of traffic and very little increase in revenue.  I think on Sunday I made about $10 extra and Monday the figure was up to about $12 extra.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ll take whatever I can get, but it would have been nice to get some extra cash.

Finally, and most importantly, after being up on Digg’s homepage, The New Business Blog was able to get some much needed exposure, and due to the added traffic I was able to make several good business connections.  I believe these connections will have a lasting effect on The New Business Blog and will help me make this a much better site.

For example, I have been in contact with the CEO of an up-and-coming site and over the next couple of days I’ll get the chance to interview him and post the Q&A session here for everyone to read.  Hopefully this will become a regular thing, where I can branch out, contact several different CEOs and have them share their thoughts on running a business.

I’ve also been asked by several companies about permanent advertising on The New Business Blog, which is something that I wasn’t expecting.  Turns out this might make up the difference for the lackluster Adsense performance!

Anyway, getting up on Digg was certainly a pretty cool experience and despite the fact it appears that the “Digg effect” has worn off, I’m convinced that the experience has changed The New Business Blog for the better.