In the Beginning
The first thing I did using digg for my politics blog was to setup a username and other information. This is very important because people will visit your profile to find out more about you. These are things such as your name, your birthday, social networking information, and a little bit about you. It is also important to add a picture as it grabs people’s attention.
When I tell people to do this they normally ask, “Why does it matter whether I had this information or not?” Well, this is what gets people to add you as a friend. Once they have added you, it allows them to follow what you are digging and submitting. Most likely they will digg whatever you submit. So getting fans and mutual friends is important on digg.
The best way to make sure that people will know about what you have submitted is to click share underneath the articles digg page. Then send a shout out to all of your mutual friends and fans. These are the people that will get your article to a multiple times so that other users will dig your article also.
The most important thing to fill out on your profile page is your web site and social networking information. You want as many avenues as possible for people to get to know you and see the articles that are on your blog.
From there I headed off and started adding friends of mine own. You will be considered a fan of anyone you add unless they add you back, which then you will be considered mutual friends. If they add you back and you know that you can send a shout out to a person. Otherwise, if they leave you as a fan you will not be able to send a shout out of your article. You can usually add up to 1,000 friends.
The Article
Once I was done with that I was able to submit my first article from my politics blog. It was named Obama Supports Stem Cell. I dug the article itself, didn’t put a picture with it, and did a shout out to a hundred of my friends. I chose for the article to be in the sub-category Elections U.S. 2008 of the World & Bussiness category.
Here are the statistics:
- 23 heads to my politics blog (directed by digg)
- 66 diggs all together
- 35 of the diggs were my friends
- 31 of the diggs were other users
- 10 comments on the article’s digg page
Conclusion
This turned out to be a pretty successful trial. I was happy to see that 23 people visited my website. None of them subscribed to my blog, but I’m sure I will get them to come back. The reason I say this is because I know they are interested in politics since they dugg my article. This tells me that I have a good chance to get my articles dugg by them again.
I did notice at one point when I had 20 diggs that 17 of them were my friends and the other three were not. That was after I submitted the article 33 minutes before. To end up with 66 diggs and 31 of them not being my digg friends shows me that my shoutout to my friends about my article allowed it to get enough digss so that other dig users would notice article as somewhat important. So having friends is really important if you want to be successful on digg.
The one thing that might be misleading is the amount of diggs I did actually receive. I feel like a lot of my diggs came because what category my article was in and the main topic. The 2008 U.S. elections category is one of the most popular on the digg website. So that could’ve been one of the reasons that I got many users digging my article that were not my friends. Also, most articles about Obama are highly supported on digg. You do not see very many negative articles about Obama dugg very many times. However, if you are doing an article about John McCain you would probably notice that writing a negative article would get you more diggs. I can conclude from that information that the article you submit will become popular based on what the interests of most digg users. It doesn’t hurt to remember that 95% of digg users are male.
Below I have put the links to the article I dug, my politics digg profile, and my personal digg profile:
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Obama_Supports_Stem_Cell/who
http://digg.com/users/mypolitics101
http://digg.com/users/onlinetreason
{ 1 trackback }
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
This was a really good way of showing us how you can use the social network to drive traffic to your blog. I just want to say thank you for doing the homework yourself so that we do not have to do it. I really enjoy reading your blog and I completely understand why you have has 20,000 subscribers on your other blogs.
I absolutely love this article. This was one of the recommendations for me on the digg website. I have enjoyed your postings and have subscribed to your blog. Keep up the good work and I’ll be looking forward to reading more of your articles.
sweet man, I looked at your digg profiles and I can see that you are pretty active on your personal one. Just like Jeff I can see why you have had 20,000 subscribers on some of your blogs. Being active and networking with others is very important to success.
Great information! Have you had any other experiences, I saw where one of your lists got dugg like close to 100 I thought. Did you do just about the same tactics or did you try anything new? And when you have you friends digg it what do you do…just send them an email saying digg this article?
Keep It SEO Simples last blog post..Application Letter For Copywriting Position
66 diggs are not all that much. You can get much more if you adhere to the Digg 10 commandments:
1. Keep your shouts private so others can’t see them.
2. Never submit pages from your own sites.
3. Never dig anything from your own sites.
4. Avoid using the digg shout system as much as possible.
5. Make friends with your digg mutual friends on other social sites that have a private message system.
6. Get your digg friends to submit your content for you, and don’t use the same person too frequently…rotate them. (use the private message system on other sites to let them know what to submit and digg)
7. Get real friends that are also members of digg to submit and/or digg your stuff. (same thing…contact them offsite)
8. Make sure those friends are not connected to your digg profile in any way.
9. Digg a big variety of content submitted by others (not just your friends), from the upcoming section, and don’t digg anything lame. Think massive quantities of mass appeal. And make sure you comment and say something intelligent that won’t get voted down on at least 50% of what you digg. You want to be one of the first few to comment. The more you do this, the more likely it will be that you will catch the eye of a more powerful digger that likes you for what you have to say and what you digg, and will digg things you digg. They have crowd appeal and you don’t. Their followers are what you are after and you get to those thru them.
10. Never friend anyone on digg that breaks the above rules. Why? Because they are poor quality diggers and their activities can get you marked as a spammer or poor quality digger, and then either your account will get banned, you submissions will get constantly burried, or people just won’t digg your stuff. If that happens, then you will be useless to your mutual digg friends, and they will not be willing to help you as much. Leave the poor quality diggers that break the above rules as just followers and not mutual friends. Don’t follow them or you will be following them to failure.
And what kinds of things should you submit besides the usual stuff that has mass appeal? Digg pages that link to yours. Your goal should be indirect traffic coming from those sites to yours and not from digg to yours. This is how you reward people that are kind enough to write about you. You give those pages a boost in PR and have more links pointing to you in the top 10 results in the search engines.
The goal is not to get a day of traffic from digg. The goal is not to increase your own page rank for your site (this will happen any way if you follow my suggestions).
The goal is to take over the entire front page of the search engines so all links will point to you, directly or indirectly when someone searches for something.
Rarely do most people ever go to page 2 of the results. they usually find what they want on page 1. If every article on page 1 sends them to you, you WIN BIG TIME, even if your site is buried on page 8 of the search results, which it won’t be if you are paying attention and learning from what I just said.
If people do all that they won’t have time to blog.
The people that think the way you do, will be beaten by those that don’t. If you have a day job, forget about digg or get someone you know with no life to be your digg presence and do it all for you.
Personally, I have given up on Digg in favor of Mixx and BlogEngage. Much less work because you don’t have to be so secretive. They don’t have bury brigades like Digg does, and the general membership doesn’t frown on people promoting their own websites.
Mixx is where all the people that are fed up with Digg are going, to build up a community that doesn’t suffer from the stupid issues the digg community does. It’s marvelous and the quality of the articles submitted is so much better.
BlogEngage was made by bloggers, for bloggers, and they don’t just accept you submitting your own content, they encourage it.
No matter which sites you use, it’s still a lot of work, especially in the beginning when you are just getting started with establishing your presence on these sites. The best way to do it and still have time for blogging is not to have every post you make submitted to these sites…just your best ones that are good examples of the type of content your site has to offer, containing the keywords you want to get ranked for.
Well, hopefully it’s worth the time.