How To Become a Power User on Digg in One Week
This post was guest blogged by Aditya Mahesh of BlogOnExpo, a social media site for “Make Money Online” and “Make Money Blogging” articles.
Zero to 500,000 in 40 Days
My site received 500,000 page views within 40 days. This is not a well established site that I have spend years working on or already have backlinks and traffic sources in place. It is a new site that I promoted heavily on social media sites, especially Digg.com. The following article will show you how I became a power user in Digg and successfully drove traffic to my sites using the social media site.
I first spent a few days looking over the structure of Digg.com and how stories are promoted to the homepage. Then, I found the perfect way to get 50% of my submissions to the homepage without breaking any of Digg’s TOS or even being unethical.
Shouting To Diggers
First, I would write a story that I thought would do well on Digg. This was usually a tech related story or something funny/strange/interesting. After I had my post submitted to Digg, I would use the shout feature to send the story to 100 of my Digg friends. These friends were the Digg users who digg hundreds of stories a day and look at everything. When you “shout” a story to these diggers, they digg it most of the time. I became friends with a number of these “big diggers” as well as a few other users who I shared content with and had developed a relationship. Then it became very simple. They would send me stories and I would send them stories using the Digg “shout feature. We would all digg only the stories we found interesting (not every story I received).
*SideNote: Its very important to note here that you ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY CANNOT SPAM. DO NOT send more than a shout or two a day and do not shout anything promotional in nature. Only shout quality content that Digg users like from a wide variety of websites (not just your own). If you Spam, everything you submit will be buried.
Don’t Just Summit Your Own Stories
However, because I submitted stories from dozens of sites (including my own) and the content I submitted interested the Digg.com audience, every story I submitted received 80+ diggs. Due to the algorithm, my stories often took 120+ Diggs to get to the homepage, and I reached this figure about 50% of the time. Whats more is that because I submitted interesting stories, my submissions often were the top submissions of the day driving 50,000+ unique visitors.
It is really that simple. To sum it up: Submit Quality Content, Make Friends of Digg, Send and Receive Shouts, and if you submit quality stories from all over the web instead of acting like a marketer only submitting your stories, you will do well.
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- How To Become a Power User on Digg in One Week | BlogOnExpo - March 24, 2008 at 7:13 am
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It’s a nice technique but it takes times to hunt for original stories and submit them.
Yes, but it’s not through doing nothing and spending 30 seconds on a website that you’re going to find yourself with 500 000 new pageviews.
Great post Aditya.
If you feel free to share…
What per visitor or per page view value did you get from those visits?
you gotta know how to please the digg crowd though!
Yes, and that takes some unique talent. It seems like the Digg crown diggs either the popular current event of the day OR something really wacky and weird.
Getting on the front page of Digg is not that easy as a newbie. At least that’s what I think.
Btw there are some really weird stories on Digg. 
Will give it a try, thanks
The title of this post is misleading. You mention that you’d developed relationships with top diggers and that takes more than a single week.
To some people it comes naturally to create relationship (yeah fast and interesting talkers with great spirit is what I mean). In either case, the article makes sense it is indeed a good strategy, but as Ben mentioned..it takes a bit longer then just a week maybe.
agreed … It does take longer than a week because you have to get the right type of people to be your friends.
I agree. It’s kind of hard to form relationships on Digg because many top users close themselves to shouts, so how else are you supposed to contact them?
I haven’t really tried this. Thanks for the heads up I’ll have to look into it.
I found that once I bought new Dell XPS laptops for the top 100 Digg users my posts seemed to rank more highly.
Hmmm… which site did you get digged?
I couldn’t see the effect on Alexa:
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/blogonexpo.com?site0=blogonexpo.com&y=r&z=3&h=300&w=610&u%5B%5D=blogonexpo.com&x=2008-03-21T00%3A38%3A07.000Z&check=www.alexa.com&signature=PzW3hz32r756GYM8qpbYKioWeSg%3D&range=6m&size=Medium
no diggs, no bullshit,
here’s my site:
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/sitehoppin.com
If you can do that with digg, this is a great post, if you can’t, John, can we get some better “guest bloggers” here?
Really, we are not stupid here.
this is something i have to try!
I never use Digg for some reason :p
http://3magin8.com
What was the need to plug in the site?
I thought John had gotten banned from Digg ? Didn’t he write a post on that ?
Yeah. I think he is banned.
Hhmm, still seems like a load of work because you have to send other stories that people will be interested in. That means you have to surf the net and find interesting, strange, or tech things that people will read and digg.
Pretty bland article, should have gone a bit more in depth I believe.
I think it was short and compact and carried the views as well as tips pretty well.
bah .. I wanted the names of the people who are frequent diggers :p
Hahaha! It’s funny how when you give people valuable information they are never satisfied. On a network I blog on for Real Estate (related to one of my other sites) I posted about viral marketing and got about 10 e-mails from people asking me “hey can you give me ideas for what is a good viral marketing idea to get me more clients????”
Great post mr. Chow ! Thanks for the advice ! I’ll try to do that with by blog.
I heard there’s no money from digg crowd. Is it true?
More likely crashed site/server from “digg effect”
Well, as long as you can handle the traffic, meaning you have a dedicated server with lots of caching, you will make money but it’s true that digg users don’t click much as your regular internet users.
This sort of a post should be backed up with some graphical data and the method used is extremely hit and miss, there’s no merit in it whatsoever.
yeah, there’s no reply for the stats i asked about, probably a “dreamer”
agreed it would establish alot of credibility to the author if it was backed up with stats.
I’ve experienced the traffics of social media last week!
–blog for dream–
Excellent info, I’ve been trying to figure out Digg for months. I’ll have to put this to the test.
yeah Alan, this works for sure. I have been doing it for a while now and it has been working like a charm.
Here is the proof in Alexa: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/zapnat.com
That doesn’t show anything more than an increase in reach over a given period. The page views don’t reflect the numbers quoted above.
Lets have a look at some analytics stats or similar.
Yeah, that’s not digg, check out this stats:
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/zapnat.com?site0=zapnat.com&site1=zedomax.com&y=r&z=3&h=300&w=610&u%5B%5D=zapnat.com&u%5B%5D=zedomax.com&x=2008-03-21T16%3A27%3A18.000Z&check=www.alexa.com&signature=U7d6Z2vSsd22hjNwP0lAql9u4C8%3D&range=3y&size=Medium
The first spike for zedomax.com, THATS called DIGG.
That was about 2 years ago when zedomax.com got digged for the first time, I am sure the spike is a lot bigger now.
It is something to give a shot. At least use different little techniques. I don’t recommend putting tons of time into one thing. As JC has said before, “Don’t put all of your eggs into one basket”. Even if you get a few thousand people to see it, it is worth it.
Hi Aditya,
You mentioned that you usually digg tech related news or funny stories. Does your method works on other niches?
Sorry for the newbie comments, since that what I am
I imagine it would work for any Digg related category.
this is not real deal.
Whatever he is doing is not legitimate…
How effective is Digg at providing long term readers? I know it has a lot to do with the quality of your site and how well it aligns with the Digg readers’ interests, but just in general how well has Digg traffic translated into regular readers?
Didn’t know digg could generate so much traffic.
Digg generated enormous traffic for many sites. And with the help of that traffic, john chow also got plenty of subscribers.!
Good article but why bother with Digg? So many of them are AdBlock-using, WoW-addicted geeks who hate anything even remotely commercial.
Should be called “How to get lots of worthless traffic in one week.”
Except for the fact that they did purchase a copy of WoW. So soome of them do spend money.
I agree Digg is a great way to build traffic. A good portion of my traffic comes from Digg which is amazing. It is however tough to write a unique and interesting post on a daily basis which will get to the front page. Not impossible I’ve done it, you can to.
I dugg it
This has also worked for me but like you said the story has to be interesting and not entirely promotional . I received a surge in traffic from digg which I had never experienced before .
Hmmmmm.. I’ve spent about 3 months submitting stories and I think maybe I’ve gotten 10 diggs at most. And the nature of my submissions is pretty diverse. I also have only about 75 friends that do receive shouts (of my maybe 600 friends). What I do get is loooooonnnggg term daily hits from digg for like my weird stories like my half man half tree piece. But otherwise no giant leaps in traffic that have crashed a server.
Hmmm john.. well pretty common article I guess… Not new to us though..
Wow. Thanks. Great Tip. The friends thing is so important. It will come top if they digg.
I hope John I’m not wrong but I found a mistake You worte in last para Don’t Just Summit Your Own Stories I think it should be Submit instead of Summit.
Hence overall a nice article
The guest poster’s blog seems sooo much like a SPLOG…, but it’s not
-Mike
I use this trick very often and have to agree yes it works…
Can’t people just say they don’t like it and then not pay?
Nice strategies… Do you think it will work much better in StumbleUpon?
digg traffic is usless, a complete waste of bandwidth!
Uh, how do you ‘Shout’ to friends?
How do I shout?
Love the advice! I need to make some Digg friends. Any friends would be nice, but definetely need some Digg friends!
Excellent article but I tend to agree that it will take more than a week to gain quality friendships that will be beneficial for the long term. Either way, good info. Thank you.
I recently made friends with a Digger that sent me like 10 shouts a day. It pizzed me off. I ended up turning my shouts off.
Digg traffic makes you no money they are all banner blind your better off spending your time developing another strategy for getting high quality traffic. I had 180,000 hit from digg in one day and made 45 bucks.
PS I love digg!
very good information.
Its really an interesting way,goona try this out very soon and get loads of traffic from Digg.com
cheers