How to Promote Your Business on Digg
October 30, 2008
Digg is a social marketing power-house and anyone who can conquer this behemoth of a site is bound to be rewarded with traffic gold! This is no easy task though and a variety of elements must come together, with of course a bit of luck. Since Digg’s algorithm is secret and always changing no one knows for sure how it all works, but we have a pretty good idea and that’s enough to give you a better chance at making the front page!
Tips to Promote Your Business on Digg
1. A Network
As with most social bookmarking sites its important to become an active and legit member of the community. You need to submit stories you find interesting and not just spam your own posts all over Digg and leave. If people like your content, you will naturally start building up your friends list. You should also add a few friends each day that you respect and have similar interests with.
The reason for this is that when you do start promoting your own stuff you can send a “shout” to your friends about your post or link your post to them via email or instant messenger. Never send them a direct link though, its better for them to find your post by going to digg.com and then going tot the appropriate category.
There’s nothing wrong with linking your article to a few friends, but if you send your article to 200 people in 10 minutes and most of them digg the article, you might trigger an alarm! So recommend your posts to a few friends, rotate who you link to on your friends list and try to let the post grow naturally most of the time.
A good network of friends combined with the next two tips will give you a much better chance of getting your post on the front page.
2. Quality Content
Quality content is a very important part of getting a front page article and the most important part of writing an article for digg is thinking about your audience. Digg has many users all of whom have different interests, so writing a very niche article will be harder to promote to the front page. So try and make your post topic as general as possible, without alienating your own site users.
Digg users are also very protective of Digg and if any affiliate links or spam elements are spotted you will find your article “buried” quickly. You should also make sure your site is clean and easy to navigate with a minimal amount of ads. Excessive annoying banners and Google ads will take away from your quality article.
As with many other social bookmarking sites, “link bait” type posts tend to do well. This means posts such as “10 Biggest Celebrity Mistakes of 2008″ or “5 Foods You Thought Were Healthy!”. These types of posts grab people’s attention, they are informative if true and they are easy to read. In general, the longer the list the better. You want to make sure people know you worked hard on the post. If you spend 2 hours writing a normal post, spend 6 hours on your Digg post.
3. Proper Marketing
The best way to market a post on digg is via your own reader base, but not every one has 10k subscribers on their blog, but if you do have a blog you should add some social bookmarking icons at the end of your post so that people can click them to vote up or bookmark your post. In addition to sending the post to your networking and adding social bookmarking button on your site you can, link your post in forums, submit it to design news sites, buy direct traffic from StumbleUpon and link to it on your Twitter account.
These combined efforts should give your post a much better chance of making the front page, but we still need to talk about one more element; is your site tough enough to handle the beating of being on the home page, better known as “The Digg Effect”?
4. The Digg Effect
Many website owners known this nickname well and for those of you who don’t, let me explain. The Digg Effect is a nickname given for the crazy amount of traffic you can receive from Digg when you article hits the home page of Digg.com, often resulting in a server crash and major downtime for your site.
You can easily get several hundred thousand visitors if your article hits at prime time (around 8PM at night in the United States). This huge amount of traffic in a very short amount of time can make many servers kick the bucket, which means all your efforts will go to waste, but not totally. Even if your server crashed when it does come up you should get some traffic the next day from still being on a sub category front page, but it will be nothing when compared to what you missed form being on the main home page.
So, be sure you talk to your web hosting company and fine tune your server settings so you can best prepare for the Digg Storm and good luck Diggers!
Gino Orlandi - Who's written 95 posts on the UPrinting.com Blog.
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November 3, 2008
Interesting comments, thanks for sharing. I know what I’m going to be doing for the next 6 hours!
June 26, 2009
Thank you for your sharing.
“You can easily get several hundred thousand visitors if your article hits the home page of Digg.comat prime time”
<<< yeah, sure. but it’s so hard to stay in home page for even a minute…..
June 27, 2009
Yes. But you will get backlinks and some of the traffic will come back at a later date. Thanks for the very useful article.
August 11, 2009
Good one. I’m gonna digg.
Biju
http://www.lenvica.com