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12 Days Of Traffic -- Day 7: The Digg Effect
For those of you who aren't familiar with Digg (there may be a couple out there) it is a social networking site where news items are submitted, shared, and ranked by users as opposed to being controlled by editors. Bloggers have discovered that getting their blog on Digg, especially the home page, will potential result in a flood of traffic to the blog, sometimes within minutes. In fact, due to the popularity of Digg, the traffic can be so overwhelming as to cause what is known as the Digg effect, where a small website's unprepared web server is brought to its knees (goes offline) due to the overwhelming traffic.
This has not escaped the notice of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) consultants who tout the importance of getting on the Digg front page. Unfortunately, theyoften don't offer any clues about how to do that, and it's easier said than done. For one thing, Digg users are easily turned off by self-promotion. Although you are allowed to submit your own articles, you run the risk of falling in that category. Also, Digg's popularity makes it a target for spamming and shameless self-promotion for the same reason it is desirable for legitimate bloggers and content provider. Further, Digg doesn't allow signatures and urls in the post body may be viewed negatively.
So what's a blogger or web publisher to do? Well, there is a right way to build Digg traffic, but it will take some time and effort. Here are some tips:
- In general, you will need to take some time to develop a trusted relationship with other Digg users.
- Try not to submit your own articles. In the beginning, you can use a few good friends to help submit your items and vote on them.
- Try to focus on your area of expertise. Identify other users who have blogs and articles similar to yours and whom you respect, and develop trusted relationships with them.
- Submit posts and articles from those trusted users blogs. If you scratch their back, they will scratch yours.
- Don't just publish, be an active reader and vote on other submissions. Comment on other submissions.
- When you commen, put a link to your own content, only if it is very relevant and helpful for readers of the original submission.
- Do not submit, or have submitted, everything you write. If you can get your most interesting articles some visibility, readers will see your other work when they get to your site.
For additional advice, check out this article with a very appropriate title:
How to Become a Digg Top User (without doing anything shady) .
To actively use Digg you will need to create an account here. After that, just go to the Digg homepage and start browsing around. Using it is fairly self-explanatory.
I will leave you with one additional gem you can use with Digg called the Social Media for Firefox Extension. What this tool does in essence is help you be the first to submit hot items to Digg by finding items on other social networking sites such as StumbledUpon and Reddit which are already popular but haven't made it yet to Digg. Being the first user to submit popular items will develop your reputation as a power user.
