Hi everyone,
I know I'm a newbie and have a low post count, but I tried the service and wanted to post my review.
I got the $40 package for 100 Digg submissions + 120 Stumbleupon votes.
Digg - 164 votes in about 24 hours. I did NOT get front page. Some of you might say that digg without frontpage is useless - but that's not entirely true. The story was a good one - so it moved to Twitter and generated over 2500 hits to the page (it bounced back and forth with a bunch of retweets for several hours). Twitter is still generating some residual traffic to that page.
StumbleUpon - A day later, the stumbleupon wave hit. As promised, 120 visitors (a little more) visited the page and rated it up. After that the traffic stopped for about 12 hours...I thought this was the only traffic it was going to generate. But I was pleasantly surprised: SU started to
REALLY show some love. At the moment, there have been 4684 pageviews and it's steadily rising - at least 1000+ additional per day, and the number grows with each passing day. With any luck it'll go super-viral
Also of note, but to a lesser extent - the story was picked up by Reddit completely organically, but it only sent a few hundred visitors before the spike died.
Digg front page is really hard to get, and as hopeful as I was, I wasn't really expecting it. However - what's REALLY important, and more important than any fancy algorithms, is the quality of the story. The front page attempt got my story enough exposure to be picked up by other social media engines. And that is exactly what I needed - that little "push" to break the story, and that is exactly what e2madina provided for me.
So my conclusion: was it worth the $40? Yes, definitely. I am still seeing traffic from this post, and I suspect (hope) that it will continue to grow and will eventually be linked to by a major site. Eventually it will be on the front page of something, who knows.
But it's worth repeating - the story needs to be link-worthy!
If anyone is interested in a more detailed review (I don't want to post any links publically), send me a PM and I can give you more information.
Thanks e2madina!