How To Get A Story To The Digg Front Page

I am sure many people know of the traffic-driving and link-buildling benefits that the efficient use of Digg can produce. In case you don’t know, in my case I have been able to drive from 600 to over 1.6 million pageviews and generate from 8 to over 700 editorially placed links pointing to sites that I have promoted to the Digg front page.

My first objective on the site was to communicate and get my profile known by other active users. In my mind, I told myself, “I was going to learn how to promote stories on this platform no matter what.” I quickly found out you should first promote other people’s work to get noticed. Then you have many ways of driving traffic to your platforms. It is easier to promote sites that have made the front page of Digg.com than newer web properties. Sites which are frequently promoted to the front page of Digg.com require less votes – Diggs – to make it. Further, sites are classified as mainstream publications such as the New York Times, Adweek, Washington Post are easier to promote. There are two reasons why you stand to benefit by promoting stories published on these sites:

1. You can easily get your Digg profile befriended by other users.
2. You can get to know writers and stakeholders of those publications that may later help you promote one of your web properties or help you in other ways; I have gotten client referrals, invitations to speaking engagements, jobs and more.

Other Digg users will want to befriend your profile when you reach the front page of Digg because their profiles receive more exposure when they Digg your story. People will be able to see their avatars on the Digg Who Dugg This? page; as per my social media policy, this documented activity creates a point of exposure – the first point of adoption in The Social Trinity on which the policy is based. You want active diggers to befriend your profile, so they could Digg your stories when you submit them. The first step I took was visit a tool that was built using the Digg API that told you which users were digging other active users’ submissions; I would query the Digg Dalai Lama, my good friend, MrBabyMan. Today, you could visit Friendstatistics.com and query a popular user such as MrBabyMan or another user you see whose submissions frequently reach the front page of Digg, like me. You will see all the Digg users who Dugg on the queried user’s submissions. For some users you will see who dugg up to their last 20 submissions, for others you will see who dugg up to their last 10. You want to befriend users who dugg most of the queried users’ – i.e. MrBabyMan – submissions whether it’s 10 or 20 stories. Each user can see who Dugg their last 10 stories; however, if you follow Friendstatistics on Twitter, it will allow you to see who dugg your last 20 submissions. The more influential a user is, the more users you will see who Digg their last 10 or 20 stories. You don’t have to do this on the first day, however, your ultimate objective is to befriend about 150 diggers and digg one to two of their submissions daily. I say one to two of their submissions because Digg has a limit as to how many submissions you could Digg on a daily basis. I perform this activity in a total of about 30 minutes time. Your objective can be met in about a month or less investing this amount of time on the platform.

Your friends’ submissions will appear on the friends’ submissions page. You will see your friends’ submission page typing http://digg.com/users/[your username]/friends/submissions into your favorite browser’s address bar. I subscribe to this page’s RSS feed and open up stories from Google reader. Once you click on one story holding down the Command button on a Mac or the CTRL button a PC, the story will load up in a neighboring tab and the next story moves up; it’s an assembly line of Diggs. You want to identify those users who submit more than twice a day. You only want to Digg a maximum of 2 stories per user, so you don’t run out of Diggs and can’t support as many of your friends as possible. You do this by subscribing to those multiple-submitting friends’ RSS feeds; visit the users submissions page by typing: http://digg.com/users/[typeusernamehere]/history/submissions You will still appear among diggers who Dugg most of that user’s submissions on Friendstatistics, and, if he is an active user, he’ll typically Digg you back. Digg only allows you to Digg about 200 to 250 stories. Once you reach your Digg limit a message pop ups stopping you from Digging any further for about 24 hours.

A Digger will typically query her own username on Friendstatistics to see which Diggers are digging on her stories. They want to know who is digging on their stories, so they can continue to Digg those people’s stories. They also want to see which diggers are not digging their stories, so they could stop digging their stories. Friendstatistics lists Diggers who don’t Digg your stories as Deadbeat Diggers at the bottom of the search results. You don’t want to waste Diggs on deadbeat diggers.

After about a week of digging content, you want to submit a url to Digg, so you could see how many Diggs you get to a story. Initially you will find that you will get the same amount of Diggs as the number of ‘active’ users you have befriended. So if you have befriended 20 ‘active’ users who reciprocate support – Digg on each other’s stories – you can expect 20 to 40 Diggs on your story. The more Diggs you get from reciprocal support the more Diggs you will get from the rest of the community. This is because as you get more Diggs your story is promoted to more popular sections of the site such as the most Dugg upcoming section, and it is exposed to other users of the community. You should first study the popular section of Digg, which is the Digg front page – the 3rd degree of adoption in the Social Trinity: study popular sections of the digital network. Some factors of stories that have a good chance of being promoted to popularity constitute the following:

• Extraordinary or unbelievable news: A Penny Costs 1.7 Cents to Produce
• The notorious top 10 list; Cracked.com has an excellent formula that can be applied to any industry Top 7 Secrets to Writing a Cracked.com Top 7 List
• Excellent or funny pictures: Shuttle Launch as Seen by Skydivers
• Infographics Why do Freeways Come to a Stop
• Breaking news with mass appeal Michael Jackson Dies

You can find domains that frequently make the front page of Digg by visiting Di66.net. You could view a list of domains which most frequently make the front page over a 24 hr to 365 day period. I would submit content from domains that most frequently made the front page of Digg over a 7-day period. Such domains are easier to promote as it takes less Diggs for them to make the front page or popular section of Digg. Mind you, social networks want to be associated with mainstream brands; it gives them credence. Remember, the more you promote stories, the easier it is going to be for people to befriend you because you will help expose their profile. Another way to get somebody to befriend your profile is to simply communicate with them through a form of private contact, which constitutes the second degree of adoption of the Social Trinity: identify points of private contact.

Once every submission generates 100 to 150 Diggs, more people will befriend your profile and Digg your submissions. If you work at it your profile can be built to generate more than 200 Diggs on almost every URL you submit. With this level of influence I have been able to promote my client’s sites, such as I noted on my social media strategy I used to drive 1.3 million pageviews to a microsite, which made up to $90k in ad revenue in 4 days.

A good proportion of Digg users constitute bloggers and active social media users of other platforms. Once you promote a story to the front page of Digg, your submission is exposed to this user base of publishers seeking great stories to feature on their sites and digital profiles. Thus Digg is a great link-building platform that can significantly boost your exposure on the search engines. You could facilitate this process by adding targeted keywords in your submission’s title. Many publishers will post a link using the title of the story as the anchor text. If you could get 200 organic links with targeted anchor text, you are in a great position to rank for that keyword in the search engines. Some pages will not automatically rank on the first page; however, I have had pages rank on pages 4, 3, 2 and the bottom of the first page of the search engine results that only needed a few more self published links – 20 to 100 -that I have been able to perform with an optimized press release or directory submissions to rank high on page one for competitive terms. Another link-building tactic is to promote stories for other websites on Digg to develop relationships with publishers. A publisher to whom you have sent hundreds of thousands or even tens of thousands of visitors will be very likely to post a link to your site using any anchor text you want. Over my entire 7-year career as a internet marketer, I have helped companies close a few million dollars in sales and donations by generating the leads for those sales through search engine traffic driven through the aforesaid link-building practices.

Neal Rodriguez features social media marketing tactics he has been able employ to his and clients monetary benefit on nealrodriguez.com.

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