Driving Traffic With Digg

For those in the social media marketing world, one of the best sources for driving traffic to a site is Digg. The Digg front page can generate tens, even hundreds of thousands of visitors in a day or two, plus can drive hundreds (sometimes thousands) of inbound links to the page.

The problem with Digg and the reason that there are no more than 10-20 social media marketing firms in the world able to use it is that out of 20,000+ submissions per day, around 120 make it.  When you take into account the dynamic of the site to favor “power users” and “whitelisted sites”, it’s a portion of traffic and link strategy that most marketers attempt but only a microscopic percentage achieve.

If you want to be one of those who succeeds, read on…

How to Hit the Digg Front Page

1) Participate… a Lot: The first rule of Digg is that it’s an insiders’ game. Unlike sites like Reddit and StumbleUpon where the quality of the content can propel a new domain submitted by a new user to the front page for massive traffic, Digg requires networking and maneuvering of domains.

Start an account and start Digging. Find people who are active and hitting the front page. If they’re hitting the front page, chances are very strong that they’re “in the game” and actively Digging those who are Digging them.  This aspect of building a strong Digg account could (and probably should) be a an article of its own, so we won’t dwell on it here. Just know – you can Digg 200, 300 or more stories per day. The more you Digg, the better your chances are of getting noticed by someone who will hopefully become your friend and Digg your submissions as well.

Patience is key – you might Digg everything someone submits for a month before they notice you and add you as a friend. They might never notice you. Remember, it’s nothing personal. Having a strong Digg account has a lot of power, but with great power comes… you know the rest.

2) Promote Only the Best: When you have a domain that has not hit the front page of Digg often (or ever) you cannot promote any old submission. It needs to be the best of the best. The worst thing that you can do to your domain is to promote something mediocre. If it hits the front page and gets buried or ends with a low Digg count, your chances of hitting again decrease dramatically.

Site owners often come to us with “We hit a few times a couple of months ago but haven’t been able to hit at all since then.” They over-promoted. They thought (as we all do) that everything they wrote was worthy of the Digg front page and needed to be promoted.  There is TorrentFreak, APOD, and XKCD – those sites hit most of the time. Otherwise, fewer submissions hit than not.

Again, be patient. Save the best of the best for promotions. Everything else can be submitted, but the more that a site is submitted by “power users” without hitting, the lower the chances that it will hit again in the future.

3) Title is (almost) Everything: A good title is necessary to hit the front page of Digg. A great title can be the difference between hitting the right sidebar of best stories of the day (where you can get the big traffic) and not hitting at all.

Learn the site. Learn the community. The old days of “Top 10 lists are the way to hit on Digg” are gone. It’s not that lists don’t hit anymore, but there is a certain fatigue associated with lists that have made them not only more difficult to hit, but also much more difficult to put on the right sidebar.

4) Pics or it Won’t Happen: Digg loves images. They love videos as well, but videos have to be excellent to do well. Pics can be good but still strike a cord with the community. Articles hit the most, but have the least chance of making it to the right sidebar. If you have a great image (or better, and image site) you have a better chance of succeeding on Digg than with a straight news site.

A great image can even help a story to succeed.

5) Be Organic: Don’t hire companies who will buy Diggs for you. Don’t promote your submissions via instant messenger. Don’t try to cheat the system. Make incredible content, a strong account, and title it right. Everything else will fall into place.

These are the basics. Every step could (and probably should) be a blog post of its own. Feel free to contact us if you need any further advice.

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