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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