Unless you've been living in a box under a rock inside a cave for the last year, you've probably at least had a few encounters with Social Bookmarking, as it has become one of the hottest things online in the most recent times. Services such as
del.icio.us,
Digg,
Reddit and
StumbleUpon have grown immensely, and is for many the primary source of finding new and interesting content to read online.
While some of these services might seem different in terms of setup at first glance, they all share the same concept. Users submit content, and if other people find it interesting, it is given more exposure to the rest of the community. Any publisher online should be thrilled by this idea, as the principle of these sites immediately offers us a new opportunity for us to promote our content. Unfortunately the idea that as long as you have quality content, it will get attention from social bookmarking sites doesn't hold up. Each and every one of the different social bookmarking services have their own internal codes of conduct, and if you're to succeed with any of them, it's important that you educate yourself on the different services.
I am not by any means claiming to be an expert on social bookmarking and the different services, but I have spent a fair share of time working with some of the services and gained a somewhat fundamental understand about what works and what doesn't. In this series of articles I will go through some of the most popular ones, and highlight the steps you should take if you want to increase your chances of success with the individual bookmarking services. In this particular article I will take a closer look at
Digg, which is by many considered to be
the social bookmarking site, and in terms of traffic potential for your articles, that is most certainly the case.
What is Digg?
Digg went online in the last part of 2004, and is widely considered to be the innovator of the specific setup they run. The original idea behind Digg was to create a democracy, where the users vote on or "Digg" the stories that they find interesting. The stories with enough votes would then be promoted to the frontpage, which results in and extraordinary amount of visitors for the websites that hosted the popular content. Since Digg gained immense popularity, they have added many factors to the algorithm that decides whether or not a story is popular, and it no longer depends solely on the amount of votes. Many claim that
Digg is no longer a democracy.
Write quality content!
That doesn't matter to us though, because we don't care about how the system works, as long as it works in a way that benefits us, am I right? The first and absolutely most important thing if you want to have success with Digg is to write quality content. As in most cases, content that nobody finds valuable will get you nowhere on Digg, and even if you might have an army of friends with Digg accounts, that won't help you because your story will probably be buried before it gains any significant exposure.
In my experience Digg users love most technology content, but one topic you should avoid submitting to Digg is SEO (Search Engine Optimization) related content. From what I can tell, this will most likely get buried as soon as it gains some momentum. And while we're on the topic of Digg's bury feature, it's one of the more confusing parts of Digg. Nobody knows exactly how it works, and how many negative votes a story needs to be buried, but if your story no longer appears in the upcoming stories section (without having been promoted to the frontpage) it has been buried.
But back to the topic at hand, how to get traffic to your blog from Digg. Apart from actually writing quality content, the most important factor on gaining exposure from Digg is what I like to label as the "sheep-factor". Essentially this means that if people see that other people like your article, they will vote for it. While we might not like it, that is the sad truth, us humans are a bunch of sheep.
Make friends!
In plain text this means that if you want to have success with Digg, you will need friends with Digg accounts. To some this might sound like trying to cheat the system, but the way it has evolved, it's a fact that without an initial 25-40 votes within the 24 hours after submission, an article will never gain exposure on Digg. And unless a story comes from a very reputable source, you will have to recruit those votes yourself. It's hard work, and it takes a lot effort, but it works. Once you've gotten your story near the top of the "Hot" part of the
upcoming section, you're almost there. From there on and out, most of the votes will come in naturally if your story is actually valuable. If you have the contacts though, don't hesitate to ask them for help to push your story on to the frontpage.
Believe it or not, this is the way that works with Digg. Don't be afraid to ask your contacts for help when you're trying to work up some popularity with Digg, as there is no shame in it. Of course, don't hesitate to emphasize that you'll be more than happy to return the favour at any time, but that's just a matter of common social intelligence.
Some things that are worth noting when it comes to Digg is that you shouldn't ask the same people to vote for all of your submissions. It has been suggested that their algorithm catches this, and is quick to punish group voting like this. Another things is that even though they have expanded into multiple topics such as Science, Business, Sports and Entertainment, their core users are still technology freaks, and it's these articles that get the most attention on Digg. Of course, you can have success with other articles on other topics as well, but most likely you won't see the same amount of visitors as technology related stories will bring in.
Consider when to submit your content
The last factor I want to mention is that you should be conscious about when you submit your article to Digg. I have not personally had much experience with this, but Matt at
Net Business Blog suggests that you'll maximize your chances of success if you submit to Digg late at night during the last two hours before midnight (US times, of course). This is because less stories are submitted during night, and this means more exposure for your article. It also means that if your story becomes popular, it will be on frontpage during the most active hours of Digg, around noon the next day.
Subscribe to our feed!
If you liked this article, I would like to encourage you to
subscribe to our RSS Feed, as this is the best way stay on top of all the latest news and articles from Bloggst. In the next series of this series of articles I will take a closer look at
StumbleUpon, and how you can use it to drive hundreds, if not thousands of visitors to your blog on a regular basis.
I agree
Digg
