A Blogger’s practial guide to success with getting traffic from Digg
1 post, 500 people who like it and you become an overnight celebrity. That is the promise of Digg to every blogger. This is my attempt to help you get going on this super fast train called Digg.
In this article I shall be discussing the following points
- Why you must use Digg?
- What is Digg?
- Necessary success factors on Digg
- How to select a good username?
- How to go about making Friends
- Power Users
- How to identify power users
- Initial set of friends
- How to find friends with mutual interest
- How to get attention of power users
- Shout or not shout?
- Articles that Digg users love and Digg-Baiting
- Digg penalty and how to avoid it
Why you must use Digg
- To succeed on Digg all that you need is a smart brain and an ability to write original and interesting post.
- Digg can bring in massive amount of traffic.
- Simply submitting your article to Digg will get you a highly valuable backlink.
- More importantly hitting the front page of Digg can get your blog a large number of links which will ensure a better performance for your blog on Google.
- If you use Digg regularly it can become a great source of content and post ideas
What is Digg?
On Digg users share content that they find interesting/useful. Other users then vote on the articles of their choice and the popularity of the article determines whether the article gets lost in the bylanes of Digg or the article hits the front page.
Necessary success factors on Digg
Actually succeeding on Digg is not complicated. Consultants/marketing gurus make it sound that way so they can justify their fees and keep you away from this wonderful source of traffic and links.
Forget about Digg and ask yourself what are the qualities common to the guy/girl popular in your office/society/college/school. Mostly these are people who were original/funny, they had the courage to stand up for things they believed in and most importantly they knew other popular guys.
Success on Digg requires you to display these 3 qualities as well
- Be original and funny/controversial
- Have the courage to stand up for something you strongly believe in
- Know the popular guys, actually make sure that the popular guys know you
How to select a good username?
Remember that the typical digg user is always in a hurry. She will look at your submission for may be 5 seconds before deciding whether she wants to see more or not. There is no proof but my personal belief is that a good, geeky username will help you get the attention of Digg users.
Never choose a user name which is same as your blog name. Digg users do not like people promoting their own content. Having a username different from your blog name will help you promote your content from time to time.
Who are Power Users: Digg may be a democracy. But unlike real world democracy in the world of Digg some votes are lot more important than other votes. These royal users are the power users of Digg. You can understand from the fact that 56% of the articles, that hit the home page, were submitted by the top 100 users
How to identify power users: Previously Digg used to publish the list of power users/top diggers. However Digg has recently stopped publishing that information, thereby making it difficult for us to find the power users.
Some methods that I use to find the power users include
- Look at the homepage of Digg. See the users, whose submissions have hit the front page.
- Find users in your niche with good number of friends
- More importantly find users who are regularly active and who tend to digg articles from different sources
Initial set of friends:
This is one thing that I think most gurus have got wrong. Everyone seems to advise the beginner to add the power users as friend. Do not add the power users as friend. At least do not start off that way. Try to think from the perspective of the power user. They get flooded with thousands of request from spammers everyday. You think they will befriend anyone who does not have a single friend?
Start by finding friends with some common interest. Finding friends with mutual friends is not that difficult. Just go to digg and search for your keywords. Digg by default gives you results from the front page. Change it to get results in the upcoming page. These are typically users who are starting out themselves and hence they love it when they get a friend request. Locate users whose submissions have got more than 5 diggs and digg their submissions.
Better still comment on those submissions. Commenting is very powerful in getting attention. Effective commenting is a great way to get the attention of power users of dig.
Shout or not shout? Shout is a method to let your friends on Digg know that you liked a particular interest. It normally increases the chance that your friends will digg your story. However do not shout everytime you digg an article. Users will tend to value your shout if you have a habit of shouting only when you have a great article to share with them.
Articles that Digg users love and Digg-Baiting
There are certain types of posts that the community at digg loves. Several articles have been written about this topic. To summarize posts that tend to get popular on digg tend to be
- Top 10 lists
- Positive articles about Apple/Google/Firefox
- Negative articles about Microsoft
- Digg loves itself just too much. So write articles about Digg. (Why else I am writing this article.
)
Read this article from wolf-howl about how to write a post that Digg will simply love.
Digg penalty and how to avoid it
Digg offers this seemingly gold-mine if you can play the games right. So some players try to game the system and Digg hits back by banning them. The problem is some innocent users get caught in the cross-fire. So stay away from any activity that may be construed as gaming the digg system. Never, never use any script that automates any part of your digging activity.
If you likes this post then show your love with a digg/ stumble or link.