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How to Win at the Digg Game - Tips by Top Digg Users - How Top Digg Users Get to The Front Page on a Daily Basis

Digg.com is one of the biggest social bookmarking sites currently in use. Because of its popularity, it can be a great site to use for driving traffic to your own website or blog. But because of its popularity, it can also be a difficult social bookmarking site to break into. After all, there are so many people on there throwing up posts that it can be easy to not get noticed on Digg. Still, if you can access the site and use it to your advantage, Digg is a terrific tool for getting more people to see the content that you want them to see. This article is an aggregation of tips from top Diggers themselves.

Here are a large number of tips for using Digg.com for driving traffic to your site.

Create a Catchy and Memorable Name
When you are creating a Digg account, you will benefit from creating a memorable username. I tend to remember users who stole celebrity names and people who have created humorous names. Just remember not to create a spammy name that tells people you are just there to get traffic to your site, such as diggmenowplease.

Build Up Your Digg Profile
One of the articles that I read stated that building up your profile is by far the most important factor that will carry a Diggers success or failure. According to the article on AdityaSpeaks.com, the 5 most important factors for a successful Digg profile are (the most important point is number 3) :

1. Number of stories submitted
2. Number of stories which became popular
3. Popularity Ratio which is the percentage of your submitted stories which became popular. Kevin Rose is the only person who has 100% popularity ratio. Means all the stories which he submitting went popular. Well for those who don’t know Kevin Rose is the founder - CEO if Digg :D
4. The number of stories you dugg
5. The number of distinct people who viewed your profile.

Brand Yourself by Using an Avatar
People will recognize you by your avatar. Don’t pass on an opportunity to get more people clicking on your stories. Put a face to your name. Try to find an image that is either very funny, very cute, or find a picture of a gorgeous woman. You are trying to get people talking about you and your avatar so take this seriously. Find or create an avatar that matches your personality and one that is either very humorous, super weird, or just really cool. I found a lot of funny avatars and avatar tools…you can see the list on this page.

Diggers Don’t Like When You Digg Your Own Articles
Digg users don’t like it when you submit our own stuff. It is okay to digg your own stories, but you should try to get someone else to submit your stories for you. The submitter should appear to not have any visual connection to you or your sites. If the Digg community finds a connection, you might be blocked or banned.

Use Feeds, News Alerts, and Social Aggregators to Stay Current on Very Current News Topics
The only way to be the very first to post a news topic, is to stay notified of the news and hot topics online. I you have subscribed to rss feeds, utilize news ticker, use social aggregators, and subscribe to news alerts, then you are probably doing the best that you can. I suggest subscribing to a select few RSS feeds or you will end up being overwhelmed. You can slowly add more RSS feeds in to the mix as time goes on. I suggest also using social aggregators such as PopURLs, DoggDot, NetVibes, or Reddiggulo.us as your start page, or at least visit them often. Another idea is to subscribe to news alerts from top news sites, top news aggregators, and niche sites.

Use Your Stumble Toolbar to Find Cool Sites to Submit to Digg
If you are having problems finding a site or article to submit to Digg, then look no further then your own StumbleUpon tool bar. I find the craziest stuff in StumbleUpon.

Know The Interests of the Digg Crowd
Just like any site or news source, this site has a trend of liking a certain type of article and disliking other types of articles. For example, Diggers don’t tend to like articles about doing better on Digg, but Sphinn users eat it up. On the other hand, Digg users love funny news, news about the iPhone, Digg usability, and Paris Hilton. However, Sphinn users hate stories about Paris Hilton. So what is my point? Don’t submit articles that don’t fit the Digg genre or you will set yourself up to fail.

Choose Your Target Source Sites
Before you are even ready to make your first post, you need to research to find some news sources that are updated frequently, but that you don’t see often on Digg.

Stay Active
Try to get on to Digg at least once a day. Becoming a top user on Digg is a lot of work. You can’t just join, submit a few stories, digg a few posts, and somehow become a top user. Like everything else in life, hard work and determination will get you to where you want to go. Pencil Digg into your busy schedule and try to digg and comment on a few stories.

Digg Stories When They Are New
Keep an eye out for new upcoming stories that you think will go hot and be one of the first people to digg and comment on it. Digging and commenting on new upcoming stories is the way to get noticed. Think about it. After you submit a story, don’t you additively watch that story to see how it is going to fare? Don’t you always notice the first user who comments on your story? Of course you do, because you have been anxiously awaiting a positive comment. Well, other members feel the same way. That is why this tactic works.

Subscribe to Digg’s RSS Feed
Subscribing to Digg’s RSS feed is the best way to stay on top of things in Digg. This also helps you to stay acquainted with the current popular trends.

Submitting a Lot of Stories
In order to get to Digg’s homepage, you need to submit a LOT of stoires. Create a favorites folder and call it something like ‘LinkBait’ … ‘DiggBait’ … ‘Diggables’ or something like this. Place in this folder sites that you will check regularly to see if there is anything worth submitting to Digg. Include the obvious sites, such as ‘Google News‘, ‘Reddit‘, ‘Netscape‘, Mashable, BoingBoing, ArsTechnica, TechCrunch, Technorati Top, and ‘PopURLs‘. But, then also place not so obvious source URLs in this page as well. Submit stories as often as you can and you will start doing well in no time.

Stories From Major News Outlets are Hot
Stories from the major news outlets tend to be the most popular stories.

Diggers Tend to Like Certain Type of Stories

  • Diggers Tend to Like Informational Top 10 Lists
    Also, Diggers tend to be interested in informational articles and stories. So if you see an article that is informational, such as top 10 Tutorials on Building a Light Bulb out of a Piece of Steak or Top List of Free Tutorial Sites. If the story has ‘Top 10′ in it, the article will probably do pretty well. Diggers love lists.
  • Diggers Tend to Love Useful Web Surfer, Webmaster, or Design Tools
    If you find a great useful tool for web users, you should definitely submit it. What is even better? A top ten list of web tools would be even better. :-)
  • Diggers Tend to Love Controversy and Gossip about Celebrities.
    There have been tons of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton posts that were hugely popular on Digg. Both of these ladies are synonymous with ‘Hot’ submissions (at least Paris is). There also have been many hugely controversial political posts as well. Submit something controversial and you are almost definitely going to do well with that post.
  • Pictures and Videos Do Really Well on Digg
    Picture and video diggs do really well on Digg lately. Find a really interesting, funny, or strange picture or video and submit it. You are sure to do well if you pick a good headline for the story.
  • Statistics in Title and Description Tend to Do Well
    Stats in the title and description tend to do well even if you can’t back up the numbers.
  • Bush Bashing and Fox News Bashing Almost Always Works on Digg
    Digg tends to be a very liberal site and most of the users tend to think that Bush is an idiot and that Fox News is spreading blatant lies. Post an article about George Bush, the Bush administration, or Fox News and you are almost guaranteed to go hot with your story.
  • Commentaries and Opinionated Articles Tend to Do Badly on Digg (Unless it is extremely controversial)
    If you want to post commentaries on Digg, be prepared to not get anywhere with your story. However, controversial articles do great.
  • There are Subcultures and Fan bases on Digg.
    There are a lot of clique / fan topics on Digg. There isn’t a list of Digg subculture topics, you just need to find out what these topics are. Some of these topics are Star Wars, Ron Paul, Linux, Wii, and Apple. If you know of more subcultures on Digg, please let me know and I will list them. Almost any good article or news item listed about one of these fan-base topics will do well.

Digg Uses an Algorithm That Not Only Counts Votes
Many people thing that Digg is run by a small number of people and that new Digg users don’t have a chance to make it to the front page. This isn’t completely true. Yes, it is much harder for a newbie to get on to the front page of Digg, but it has been done. Digg not only counts the number of votes, but it also takes in to account how many friends that Digg user has. Newer users’(those with few friends) votes count more than a user who has a lot of friends. On the other hand, a story that gets a large amount of votes gets shown on the ‘most voted’ page of ‘upcoming‘ stories, which puts it in front of more potential voters more easily.

Try to Time Your Diggs
Try to time your digg submissions at times when you know that is an active time for your friends. The more friends that you have online, the more likely that they will see your upcoming story and digg it.

Try to Submit Stories on Off Peak Hours
Another good tip, especially if you don’t have a lot of Digg friends yet, is to submit your stories in the middle of the night when there is little competition. This way your story has some time to get noticed and dugg. Try to time your Diggs for about 7 - 9 AM Eastern time (GMT -4). Use Dugg Analytics to view statistically what time is best for you to submit your articles.

Don’t Submit Your Own Stories Until You Are Able to Get 20 or More Diggs
Don’t submit your own stories until you are able to get 20 or more Diggs from another site’s story. Also, if you start out using other site’s stories, you build up your karma with other members. Nobody will think that you are using Digg to promote your own stories if you start out submitting other site’s stories. Here is a story called ‘The Dangers of Digg Self-Submission‘.

Don’t Submit Stories to Digg if it is a ReBlog / ReCap of a Larger Story
This tip seems obvious to me, but it must be said. If you continuously submit already submitted stories, you are in danger of getting your domain and account being banned from Digg. For example, If you use reblog (a software that allows you to use other people’s stories as your blog) then using Digg isn’t for you. You should only be submitting original content. However, if you recap a larger story, but also added commentary and something unique to the story, then it is okay for you to submit that story to Digg. Below, you can see what is stated in Digg’s FAQ. Beware, this doesn’t mean that people don’t break the rules. Yesterday, I saw the same story submitted over and over again about Britney being pregnant with her 3rd child.

Is it a duplicate story if I submit a similar story but from a different source?
That isn’t for us to decide. Sometimes there is a better story from another news outlet. We let our users determine that aspect of duplicate submissions. It is, however, a duplicate story if you submit the same story from the same source.

Digg’s FAQ also says: “We strongly discourage the submission of duplicate stories as it only steals credit from the first submitter.”

Make Sure to Use a Catchy Title for Your Digg Stories
Unless people find your article’s title interesting, they won’t click on them. Even if your article is just so-so, if you spin the title in a way that makes it sound exciting, you will get people to click through to read your story. Diggitizer is a cool (and funny if you ask me) tool that helps you create a good title for your digg stories. Maybe this tool will help you if you are stuck for a good story title. Some tips are to use the words ‘Cool, Top, Best, New, How, Free, Launch, and First.’ Read this article for writing quality Digg titles … and … Here is a good article on how to write a title for Digg stories.

Also, if you are submitting someone else’s article, it is usually better to create your own catchy title. Probably the author of the article wasn’t creating a title specifically for Diggers. You probably know better what titles work on Digg, so I suggest you create a new title for the Digg post.

Digg Story Descriptions are Very Important Too.
Titles are very important to grab the Digg users in, but please don’t forget about the description. The reader wants to know more before they click on the link to the story. It is acceptable to just copy and paste the first paragraph of the story, but I usually prefer a more to the point approach. I want to know quickly whether or not I am interested, and most Diggers feel the same way. I would suggest highlighting the key points of the story in only one or two sentences.

Place Your Article in a Non Competitive Category
You might have noticed that some categories move way too fast for your articles (such as Offbeat News) to even have a chance to get Dugg. Try finding a category (that matches your article’s content) that moves a bit slower, such as Technology > Gadgets or Sports > Golf. However, don’t get caught putting your story in a category that doesn’t even match your content or you will find your story buried or even banned.

Content is King … or Maybe Not?
Some of the articles that I read said that content was the most important part of the Digg process. Other articles said that the better the content, the worst the story does. I have found both to be true. It seems like the stupidest stories get to the top sometimes. And I have posted some amazing articles that went unnoticed. It is very frustrating sometimes.

Don’t Submit Every Page of a Multi-Page Story
Digg users hate when you submit multiple pages from a multi-page story. You might even be banned for spamming. If you find a multiple page story that you want to submit, then find the first page of the story and submit that page to Digg.

Don’t Over Use Keywords
Don’t overuse keywords in a spammy way. Some people spam Digg with keyword heavy submissions so that they will get traffic from the Digg search engine. Don’t do this, you will get banned anyways.

Don’t Submit a Story that is written in Greek
Don’t you hate it when people submit stories in Russian or Japanese and all you see are funky characters?Please don’t be one of those people. LOL.

You Have Submitted a Story and Your Story is Listed in Upcoming … Now What?
After you post your story to Digg, your story lands up in the Upcoming section that you posted to. If you posted to Technology > Design, then look for your story in Technology>Design and then click on ‘Upcoming’ in the upper right corner. Watch for your story on the right side bar called ‘Hot in All Topics’ if you are on the front upcoming page or ‘Hot in Design’ if you are on the Technology > Design Upcoming page. When you hit 30 - 40 Diggs, you usually appear on the front page ‘Hot in All Topics’ side bar. When your story disappears off of the ‘Hot in All Topics’ or ‘Hot in Design’ sidebar, it has either gone ‘Popular’ or was buried. DON’T BURY OTHER PEOPLE’S STORIES TO GET YOURS TO THE TOP!!! This silliness will get you banned, not to mention that it is just ethically wrong. However, you can bury articles that you feel are nonsense or that are spammy. When your story is in the hot stage, you should play the upcoming page. Digg good articles, bury bad articles, and comment on as many as you can. This will get more people to digg your article because people notice that you are being active in the community.

Votes Count More the Quicker They Come
Votes count more when they come in quick succession. Try to get your friends and family members to digg your submissions within a 30 - 60 minute window.

Comment on Articles That You Have Submitted
After your submitted article starts to get a few Diggs, make a comment on the Digg to get the conversation rolling. Don’t say something like ‘this is the coolest story’. Instead, say something meaningful, interesting, or funny. Continue to comment as more people do to keep the conversation going. This is not only a good way to keep people interested in the submitted story, but it also builds up your credibility, and possible friendships with other Diggers.

Comment AND Digg Stories
If you have something to say, then say it. If you are a very quiet person, and you don’t ever have anything to say, then this is a problem. You need to force yourself to make comments on stories. The reason that it is important to comment on Digg stories is so that other users start remembering your username and avatar. You want to become branded in everyone’s However, remember that commenting on a story won’t count for anything for the story if you don’t remember to digg it too. Here is a cool tool to track your comments and how many diggs each comment received.

Make Friends, Be Friendly, and Network Away
Making friends has become the most important strategy to becoming a top user on Digg. Even if you aren’t inherently a social person, you will need to become one to win at the Digg game. On other social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, there’s no easy way to contact Digg members, browse their photo gallery or break the ice first. The way that you make friends on Digg is by looking at member’s statistics, comments, and stories and forming your opinion that way. It takes a bit of getting used to.

Seek Out Top Diggers
Seek out Digg top diggers and get their attention. Top diggers have put in a lot of work to become top diggers and they demand your respect. Make sure to get on their good side. Make them your friends, digg their submitted stories, and comment on their Digg submissions. You should also visit their blogs and make positive comments and suggestions on their blog. I also suggest placing top diggers on your blogroll to really get their attention. Another good idea is to review their blog in a positive light or interview them. If this top digger is on sites like MyBlogLog, add them to your network. Find out where these users hang out online, such as forums, blogs, communities. Start hanging out in those places as well. You need to then take part in those communities too and make helpful, friendly, and maybe even funny comments and observations. Try as hard as you can to build a relationship with this Digger by building not only your credibility but by trying to show your similarities to that person (not blatantly just in casual conversations). Never ask these users to Digg you as you don’t want them to know that you are looking for Diggs from them. Let your great content speak for itself.

Frequently Check to See Who Has Befriended You
Frequently check to see who has befriended you. If someone has added you as their friend, check out their profile before adding them as a friend. You can try to add them to see if they Digg your stories, after all, they did just add you as a friend so they might like your content. You can always dump them later if they don’t digg your content.

You Don’t Need All of Those Friends, Do You?
Every once in a while, you need to reduce the number of friends that you have. Yes, it sounds strange, but it is true. Like I said earlier in this article, the more friends you have, the less each vote counts. In other words, if you get 30 votes with only 5 friends, your votes will count more than a person who also gets 30 votes but has 300 friends. You should unfriend people who don’t Digg your content. You should keep top Digg users and people who befriended you, but other than that, I would prune the rest. Use this tool to find out which members are Digging your content. Some of the top users have as little as a few dozen friends, so don’t be afraid to cut down your list of friends a bit. Only 1 out of every 100 Digg users are active participants in the community. You are trying to find the needles in the haystack.

Be Selective When Adding Friends on Digg
Adding friends is essential to become a successful Digger. Your first instinct may be to add as many friends as you can. Don’t go adding huge numbers of friends though, instead be very selective. Look at members who have digged your past or current stories. Take a look at this member’s Digg stats. Have any of their diggs gone popular? Do they have plenty of submissions? Do they have plenty of comments? If they do, I usually make them friends. You should also make friends with some or all of the top Diggers . One reason for this is so that you can follow their lead. See how they do it…they are obviously doing something right. For example, check out their titles, their descriptions, what types of articles they submit, etc. Use Dugg Analytics to view stats about Digg members. The good news is that once you start hitting the home page of Digg, you won’t need to search for friends anymore, they will come and seek you out. Only 1 out of every 100 Digg users is active in the Digg community. Your job is to find those needles in the haystack. You can even add the #1 Digger, Kevin Rose , or the #1 digger Mr. BabyMan. He has a 100% Popular ratio … he is the only one on Digg who can boast that percentage. What does an ideal friend look like? Take it from Brett Borders on Copy Brighter, your ideal friend does the following …

  • Checks in and uses the site daily
  • Diggs a lot of stories
  • Checks for stories that their friends submit and diggs them regularly
  • Submits stories that you will enjoy following and voting on
  • Doesn’t submit way too many stories
  • Doesn’t have 50 zillion friends

Note: When you add a friend on Digg, you will see their submissions, but they won’t see yours. When you add a friend, you are becoming their fan unless they add you as a friend too. If this user adds you as a friend, then you will both be mutual friends and both of you will see each other’s submissions.

Make Friends with Your Fans
For the most part, fans are the Digg members who like your Diggs and your submissions. Make friends with the people who are fans of you. After you both have befriended each other, you will both be able to check out each other’s submissions.

Digging Your Friends’ Stories & Your Friend’s Digging Your Stories
Don’t just blindly Digg all of your friends’ articles. This is very tempting to do since you are a busy person and you have a lot of other things to do. However, you will more than likely get banned if you keep doing this over a period of time. Instead, only click through to the articles that you find interesting or that already have a number of Diggs. Also, take the time to click through to make a meaningful comment (not just - great or liked it).

Don’t shout ‘Digg this’ to all of your friends. Instead build up a report with all of your ‘friends’ or better yet, become actual online friends. Also, if the same people keep digging your stories, you will get caught. Also if your friends digg your stories too quickly, it will appear unnatural and you will get caught.

Superficial Conversation Doesn’t Work
In order to be successful with Digg, you can’t just send superficial messages to other Digg members and Digg friends. An example of a superficial Digg message is “Digg my stories and I will Digg yours”. Instead try to make a deeper impact on this user. An example of a deeper conversation starter would be “I saw your post on business card design ideas and I really enjoyed it. I am adding you as a friend because I see that you have dugg a lot of stories that I find very useful. Are you a designer too?” Although it might feel like it will take forever to make friends this way, if you want to become successful at this, then try to at least make some friends this way.

Follow and Digg Your Friends’ Content
After you have added some friends, you will need to stalk them and Digg their content. How do you do this? It is easy, just do the following:

  1. Go to your profile
  2. Click on the Friends’ Activity tab up top
  3. Now look at the right side bar and click on submissions
  4. Browse through and Digg all of your friend’s stories that you like (don’t leave any of your friend’s out … if you find that you consistently don’t like one of your friend’s stories, then find a more compatible friend.

After you continuously Digg your friend’s stories, they will take notice and reciprocate. If one of your friends doesn’t catch on after a while, maybe they should be on your friend’s list.

Learn How to Have a Tough Skin
If you are going to be a top Digger, then you will need to grow a tough shell. Some Diggers are very rude and they will personally attack everything you like about yourself. Don’t take everything to heart. These Diggers are either trying to get attention, are trolls, or are just plain mean. Some things that these people say are true though, so try to learn from your past mistakes.

To Be Nice or To Be Rude
There are several different ways to get attention on Digg, some people prefer to be jerks and some prefer to be nice.

  • Be Extremely Rude to Get Attention
    I hate this one, but since I am aggregating everything that I found out about Digg, I am going to repeat it for you. I am against this tip, but if you aren’t, then go ahead and try it. Be rude and people will notice you. Beware, some people may block you and then they won’t see any of your stories. Try to create mortal enemies to get even more attention.
  • Or Don’t Be a Troll - Stop Being Rude
    Trolls are jerks, so don’t be one. It is very frustrating when you work for days on an article and then someone says nasty things about your writing style, the design of your page, or other personal attacks. People will think you are a jerkhole and they will block your user account so that they don’t see your posts at all. You catch more flies with honey, so be sweet. Be nice even when others are being mean and heartless. Maybe Digg members will stop and think twice before burying your story to raise the rank of their own story if they know that you have been kind to them. You never know, it might work.

StumbleUpon and Digg Together Make a Great Team
Using Digg along with StumbleUpon is a good idea. Add a digg button to the article that you are going to submit to Digg (if it is on your site that is) and then submit the article to Digg and then to StumbleUpon. Hopefully the two together will work to your benefit.

Save Your Site From Going Down with the Digg Effect
If you are going to try to get a page digged to the front page, you need to worry about The Digg Effect. Simply said, The Digg Effect is when your site crashes from so many Diggers visiting your site at once. The way that your server goes down is that your server gets suddenly hit with a spike of thousands of requests, overloading your server. Read this article for many ideas for Digg proofing your site. Also, if your site cannot handle a popular Digg, then you should consider first mirroring your site. Visit The Coral Content Distribution Network. CoralCDN is a free peer-to-peer content distribution network, comprised of a world-wide network of web proxies and nameservers. It allows a user to run a web site that offers high performance and meets huge demand, and all for free. There is also a possibility that your site’s cache was picked up by DuggMirror, but only if you were listed in popular upcoming stories long enough, and even then it isn’t always a sure thing.

Use Digg Tools to Enhance Your Digg Experience
Enhance your Digg experience with Digg Tools like Smart Digg Button, Digg Alerter, and the powerful Social Media for Firefox browser tool … and here are more Firefox Digg tools. Use Dugg Analytics to analyze Digg data…it is an amazing tool. Also, you should read this article - 29 Awesome Tools Built on the Digg API.

Don’t Game the System
Even though there is software and web sites that offer services to allow you to game Digg and other social networking sites, doesn’t mean that it is acceptable. Digg is a community, a place where users can get together to discuss the things that they do and don’t like on the web. Despite the fact that many people on Digg to promote their own online work, Digg is still widely used for the purpose of community and online sharing. People who violate Digg’s community rules will essentially be shunned by Digg members and ultimately banned. Read Subvert and Profit. It is an article about the site Subvert and Profit, a site that games Digg. The premise of the article is that if you use gaming systems, your article might continue to get diggs, but Digg will bury your story anyways. So gaming the system isn’t worth it.

Add a Digg Button / Widget to Your Site
If your submitting your own content, then you should add a Digg button to all of your articles. Adding a Digg button / widget to all of your articles, gives each of them a higher chance on Digg, and as an added perk, you are helping to increase the number on Digg. Take a look at this page on Digg to find the perfect widget for your site.

Learn From Your Past Mistakes
If your story was buried or just totally missed by everyone, learn why this happened. Did you submit a lame story? Was your title not enticing enough? Maybe you submitted in the wrong category? Did you submit a story at peak hours when there is way too much interesting stories to compete? Do you need to make more friends? Be honest, is it a lame story? There are some Digg tools to help you find out why you were buried, such as Digg Spy, Digg Alerter and The Bury Brigade Exists. You might be surprised to find out that there were just vindictive webmasters trying to get above you so they worked together to bury your story. This just happened to me yesterday. Also here are some interesting links. Top 50 Buriers in the Bury Brigade .. Digg’s Dark Future and Online Censorship .. Digg’s Failure and When No Moderation Doesn’t Work .. Digg’s Bury System is Being Abused .. An Open Letter to Kevin Rose ..and a post on Diggs blog .. On Buries and Blocking.

Try, Try, and Try Again
Try posting at least once a day. The only way to succeed is to try until you get it right. And after you get it right, keep doing it right (easier said than done). Your persistence will pay off, I promise you. If you don’t give up, you will find yourself being a top digger. Don’t give up. You will have your up days and your down days.

Sources: Here are the blogs and articles that I found some of this useful information from (also used forums and communities)

11 Tips to Enhance Your Digg User Experience (And Hopefully Bring You Front Page Fame)

White Hat Digging - 3 Tips and Tricks for Understanding and Submitting to Digg

How to Get to Digg’s Front Page

Digg Tips - The Official Guide on How to Get Dugg

Digg, Diggers, and Dugg

Welcome to Digg School - 4 Tips to Digg Success

The Top 25 Digg Tips

5 Simple Tips to Get on The Front Page of Digg

How to Assplode Your Blog with Digg

Digg Secrets Exposed - Tips to Increase Your Story Visibility on Digg

Why I Hit the Digg Home Page on a Daily Basis

Demand Your Presence on Digg with 6 Simple Steps

How to Make the Digg Homepage

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Oct 28
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Tips for Viral Success For The Online Social Networker

Tips for Viral Success : Viral Marketing and Networking Techniques for Social Networkers

Are you aware of the importance of viral success? If the term doesn’t mean anything to you, you’d better get on top of learning about your marketing or you’re never going to make it in the world of dog-eat-dog Internet business. Viral marketing is a term that refers to the way that a marketing campaign is picked up and spread around the world, or at least around the Internet, creating success for a business. Like a virus, word about the business spreads. Viral success is a critical component of business success in today’s world, so you should know the strategies for it if you’re hoping to succeed.

Some of the strategies for viral success include:

(1) Move People to Feel Deep Emotions

The most important step in viral marketing is to strike up emotions in people. Whether that emotion is:

· Laughter

· Love

· Hate

· Anger

· Excitement

· Compassion

· Deep Interest

· Feeling That Someone is an Idiot (not an emotion but this works)

Stop trying to please everyone with safe content and try get people excited, agitated, or laughing. Get people’s blood pumping and get those Diggs.

Note: Allow people a place to comment to vent their emotions:

When people are feeling emotions, they want to talk about their feelings with other people. Make sure that you have a place for people to make comments on your article. That is why blog software is perfect for viral marketing. Don’t delete negative comments unless they border on abusive.

(2) Social Bookmarking and Social Networking

Social bookmarking. Of course! What better way to spread the word about your work than through sites that are specifically designed for users to spread the word about what they like. Make the most of social bookmarking by getting your content on the best, most appropriate, sites on a regular basis through a targeted social bookmarking campaign. If enough people pick up on your content through these tools, you can see viral success just from this alone. I wrote an article on ‘Boosting Your Traffic Through Social Networking Sites’ that should help you if you want further help on this topic.

Tip: Take a Multi-faceted Approach.

Even if you do see viral success from social bookmaking, you’ll want to take a multi-faceted approach to your marketing to reach the broadest audience. Some people like to read articles. Others like to watch videos. Still others have their attention caught best by the blogs they subscribe to. Use a multi-faceted approach to reach more people (and then use social bookmarking for all of these things to spread the word further and more quickly).

(3) Tap into the Viral Power of Celebrities or Popular Fads

The idea is very simple. Take advantage of the popularity of a celebrity, fad, newsworthy story, or other highly searched keyword. For example, writing an article about Britney Spears has a higher chance of viral success than an article about dog farts. The below tools will help you find out what the most popular searches are for that day, week, month, and year.

· What is popular today from Google Content - http://current.com/topics/76253632_google_current?sort=currentness

· Google Trends -
http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends

· Ask.com Top Searches -
http://about.ask.com/en/docs/iq/iq.shtml

· Lycos 50 -
http://50.lycos.com/

(4) Sequels of Successful Content

Many webmasters make the mistake of not trying to take advantage of past successful content launches. If you created an article that was hugely successful then you should try making sequels of that article. You can post a Part II, Part III, etc. with useful tips, tools, or further in depth coverage of the same topic. Some ideas for additional things to add to a topic are:

· Online related resources

· Useful tools

· Real world examples

· Video follow-ups

· Discussions about the comments you received regarding that topic

· Extras or goodies

· Post about other articles on the net with opposite views from you and argue the topic

· Interview someone with experience on the topic who has your view

· Interview someone with experience on the topic who has an opposing view and argue your case

(5) Sex Sells

If your target market is male, half naked women will really get you far. Sex is known to sell everything from beer, cigarettes, guns, cars, and everything in between. Although sex has nothing to do with any of these things, it peaks the male viewer’s attention enough to listen to or click through to whatever you are promoting. I don’t use this tactic, but I know that it works.

(6) Offer Something Free

Offer people something valuable for free to get people to come to your site. For example, there are plenty of people who are hungry for useful information on specific topics such as “How to Drive Traffic to Your Site” or “How to Start an eBay Business”. When people are desperate for information, it is easy to get them to download a free ebook. If one person reads your ebook and it is helpful to them, they will tell everyone about it. You will soon have a huge number of people coming to your site to download your free ebook. Of course there will also be people who send other people to your ebook. How will those people know about your web site? They will know your url because your will plaster your url all over that ebook so that people who get your ebook from someone else will visit your site. Essentially, it is one huge advertisement for your site…unless your ebook is a piece of junk. Make sure to write valuable content that actually is helpful to readers, or nobody will send it to anyone else or add a link to your site.

(7) Video

Video is one of the hottest things on the web today so you should be incorporating it into your site. If you create a video that evokes strong emotions, people will share it and share it faaaaaaaaaaaaaast. That’s the essence of viral success. You will know quickly if your video clip is a success. Make sure that you have plenty of CPU and bandwidth available on your server…or it will crash and crash hard.

What sites should you submit your videos to?

At the minimum you should list your videos on YouTube.com, Google Videos, and Digg.com but there are other alternatives that you should submit them to if you have the time. Here is a list of alternatives to YouTube. I suggest that you take a look at these sites to see which ones are worth while for you. You should also submit your videos to the normal social bookmarking sites as well.


(8) Improve Your Content

Don’t have content for content’s sake. There’s been a big push recently to get as much content as possible on websites so that search engines see keywords in that content. But as users get savvier about the web, they are getting increasingly interested in the quality of content. It’s easy for them to just click away if your content isn’t good, so make sure that you’re not sacrificing the content just to get the right tags and quantity of content on the site. No one is going to spread the word about content that is bad.

(9) Text (SMS) Messages

People these days love to text one another so give them something short and easy to remember to text to others. Brand yourself with a great phrase that reminds people of who you are and what you do; your own slogan if you will. Make it text-worthy and brief and you’ll see your name cropping up in conversation.

(10) Forwarding Emails

According to a study done by MarketingSherpa, the top viral marketing strategy used by B2C companies in the US last year was email forwarding. I find this hard to believe, but I will explain to you what the process of viral email forwarding is:

You have received email forwarding campaigns before. I get them from my Mom, my Dad, My husband’s Grandmother and his Mother, as well as many of my friends. These are emails that have been forwarded from one person to another to another to another and so forth. Usually the ones from my family are emails that say things like “Don’t honk your car horn because there is a murderer out there who will shoot you if you honk your horn”. Do you get those too? I consider forwarded email junk and throw these emails away, that is why I am not the best person to explain email forwarding to you since I hate these campaigns. The great thing about email forwarding campaigns is that they can continue to accelerate as new groups of people are exposed to the campaign.

How Do I get people to forward my email to other people?

· The only way that someone will forward your email to other people is:

· There is a mutual benefit for them to send the email to others.

· Person shares your interests and thinks their friends will be interested as well

· Email has a great deal or free item.

· Upcoming event that they would like to share with others

· Scare tactic (like the above example) – please don’t do this.

(11) Use Signatures with Your Sites Info at the Bottom of Every Email

Every email that you send out should contain a signature. A signature is at the end of your emails and should look something like this:

Rachel Goldstein
Social Networking Articles
Social Networking & Social Media Articles
http://www.socialnetworkingarticles.com/
rgold@socialnetworkingarticles.com

You probably won’t get a ton of traffic from this but you never know when someone will see your signature and give you the big break that you have been hoping for. Every little bit helps.

(12) Networking on Message Boards, Chat Rooms, and Community Sites

Message boards and chat rooms attract individuals in need of advice. Take advantage of this. Just make sure not to blatantly market your services. This might infuriate people and you could get flamed or kicked out among other things. The way to network in this situation is to be as helpful and knowledgeable as you possibly can. If you are in a graphic design message board and someone is baffled about how to use layers in Photoshop, you could explain the process. You could maybe mention that you use Photoshop daily when running your design business. THEN at the bottom of the page use a signature.

Tip: I suggest searching the forums in your niche for specific articles that you have just written. This way you can say things like, ‘I just wrote about the topic of your question, take a look at this article.” However, you have to be established in that forum for a while before you try that or people will think you are spamming (I know because I run a large forum and I catch people doing this all the time. I don’t mind if they are already established and offer help to people who need it.)

(13) Become an Expert in Your Niche Market

There are Question and Answer sites all over the Internet. By offering answers on these questions, your name (and url) will get around quickly. Some Question / Answer sites are:

· AllExperts.com

· Yahoo Answers

· Answers.com

· Experts Exchange

· Wiki Answers

· MyLot

· CareerBuds

There are many more similar sites, and I will most likely link to them in an article later on.

(14) ‘Invite Friends’ or ‘Send Article to Friends’ Button

Placing a ‘Send Article to Friends’ button on your articles is always a good idea. Webmasters don’t use these types of buttons as often as they used to because of social bookmarking sites. However, if you have room on your article pages, I suggest that you place both social bookmarking and ‘send article to friend’ buttons.

On the front page of your site you should place an ‘Invite Friends’ button. If you have room to place it elsewhere, I suggest that you do that too.

(15) Submit Mini Articles to Article Banks

You want original content on your site so that you don’t get busted by Google for duplicate content. However, you still want to get your site’s url out on the net. My suggestion to you is to write great content for your own site and never send these articles out to article banks. My suggestion is to keep those great articles on your own site and write mini-articles to send out to article banks. At the bottom of the article, you can write the url to the full article. If this isn’t allowed, then you should write the full url in your signature. Make sure to utilize the signature with information about your site and list your urls.

I think this is all that I have in me for today…I will have to write a part II of this article at a later time.

Think of viral marketing as putting your name on the lips of the people that you want to talk about you. Basically, give them something worth talking about – in the form of good content – and give them a way to do it – through a social bookmarking site – and you’ll see viral success.


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Oct 26
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Tips for Boosting Your Traffic on Social Networking & Bookmarking Sites

Tips for increasing your traffic to your web sites via Social Bookmarking and Social Networking Sites

There’s a good chance that you’re already on one of the major social networking sites. You reconnect with former school friends on Classmates.com. You keep track of all your social contacts on MySpace. Or maybe you have a networking of professional contacts on a site such as LinkedIn. But are you harnessing the power of those social networking sites? Are you using them to direct traffic to your own site? If not, you could be missing out on a big opportunity for increasing your site traffic and generating attention to your site. Here is an article introducing you to the basics of social networking and what it is.

So What Are Some Ways That I Can Utilize Social Networking and Social Bookmarking Sites For Traffic?


(1) Utilize Your Existing ‘Real’ Friends

One great way to use social networking to increase traffic is to get all of your friends on a particular network to support your content on other sites. For example, you might post an article to a major social bookmarking site such as Digg or Del.icio.us. Then you can send a message to everyone that you know on your social networking sites asking them to take a minute to support your post on the bookmarking site. You can even encourage them to have their network support you as well. This increases your credibility on the social bookmarking site (because you’re getting a lot of Diggs on Digg for example) which will draw attention to your content there and send traffic to your site. **tip** If you are able to, organize an article post time so that your friends can digg, tag, or stumble your article within a 24 hour period (preferably within the hour). A site called exchangemytags.com will be useful for this task. Keep your eyes on exchangemytags.com which will be launching very soon.

(2) Make Friends with Strangers to Make a Large Network of Connections

Of course, you can also use social networking sites to make connections with complete strangers. This only works for some people because users tend to be wary of networking with complete strangers. However, if you develop a strong profile and a pitch to users of the networking sites, it can work. This is best for people who have a niche market that they want to work with. For example, if you work in the music industry, you can make friends with bands on a site like MySpace music; they’ll be interested in networking with you because it can be a mutually beneficial situation. Then you can use your increased network to drive traffic to your site.

(3) Bookmarks on Social Bookmarking Sites

Yesterday I published a blog entry with a few hundred social bookmarking sites. You need to utilize this list in order to submit your links and articles to these sites in order to utilize the strongest source of potential incoming links. Believe me when I say that it works. If you work hard enough at it, you can get more people coming to your site than from Google. At the minimum, you need to utilize the most popular social bookmarking sites which are:

Backflip

BlinkBits

Blinklist

BlogMarks

BlueDot

De.lic.ious

Digg

Diigo

Facebook

Furl (Looksmart)

Google Bookmarks

Magnolia

MyWeb Yahoo

Netscape

Netvouz

Newsvine

Popurls

Reddit

Simpy

Slashdot

Spurl

Squidoo

StumbleUpon

Technorati

YouTube / Flickr (media only)

(4) Picture Perfect

You may not realize it, but by passing on uploading your picture, you are also passing on an opportunity to get more people clicking on your articles. Why? Well, for one, it is known that spammers never take the time to upload a picture. Second, it is called ’social’ networking and ’social’ bookmarking sites. If you are trying to be ’social’ then you should put a face to your name.

(4a) Get a Funny or Extremely Cool Avatar for Your Picture

A great way to get pictures to click on your articles is by using a funny or extremely interesting picture as your avatar. You are trying to get people talking about you and your avatar so take this seriously. Find or create an avatar that matches your personality and one that is either very humorous, super weird, or just really cool. I found a lot of funny avatars and avatar tools on the following sites:

Avatarist

Avatars DB

Forums Extreme

A Parody Image Generator (really cool for avatars)

Gizmos (You can animate yourself talking)

Create My Picture (You can create a picture a cartoon face for an avatar)

27 Avatar Makers from Mashable

(5) Dress Up Your Profile

Think of your social networking profile pages as ‘real’ web pages … because really they are. Profile pages get spidered by search engines and they have links to other pages on the net, just like any other web page. You can utilize this profile to promote your web sites as well as your profiles on other social networking sites. For example, if I have a profile on MySpace, StumbleUpon, and LinkedIn, then I will want to link to:

  • StumbleUpon and LinkedIn from MySpace
  • StumbleUpon and MySpace from LinkedIn
  • MySpace and LinkedIn from StumbleUpon

Not only will this increase the number of hits that I get on my profile pages via search engines and direct clicks, but it will also increase the number of friends that I have. The more friends that I have in my network, the more popular my profile and articles can become.

You should also add content and fill out information on your profile to show that you are an avid member. Add keyword relevant content on your profile page without being ’spammy’ about it. This will help with internal searches and possibly also with Google and other search engines. You can add content relevant feeds to some profiles with rss2image and other services.

(6) Add Social Bookmarking Buttons / Widgets / Chicklets

You might not like the way that they look, but I have to admit that social bookmarking buttons are what get me the most traffic. I use a service called AddThis, and it works great for me. Here are more social bookmarking widgets and tutorials that might help you:

3Spots

Add to Any

Add to Any Bookmark

Add to Bookmarks

Apostolos Dountsis Social Bookmarks Plugin for WordPress

Badged.net

Beautiful Beta: Dynamic Rollover DHTML Social Bookmark Buttons

The Bookmarketer

Bookmarkz!

Blogger Social Bookmarking Tool

Buttonr.com

Darxr.net: Social Bookmarks Sidebar Widget for WordPress

Dashboard Widgets

Easy Wordpress Widget for Social Bookmarking Sites

Ekstreme: Social Bookmarking Submission Code

Gath Adams: Build Your Own Social Bookmark Widget

GrayWolf’s Social Bookmark Scripts & Widgets

iFeedReaders

Oscandy: The Multiple Social Bookmarking Widget

Manhattan Service: Social Bookmark Tool

OnlyWire

Pheedo

PopMarks

Postli

PunchCard Manual

Romlet

Socialbookmarker

Social Bookmarks 3.1

Swicki Builder

Shout List Icons

Social Bookmark Script: Web 2.0 Optimierung

SocialBookmarkIt

Socialize It

The Socializer

Tips n Tricks Social Bookmarking Buttons

Top Ranks Social Bookmarks Creator

WebCosmo

WpBlogBMLet

WidgetBox: Ultimate Social Bookmark

WP Plugin: Gregarious

YouFame.net: Social Bookmarking Widget Generator


Your Minis Social Bookmarking

YourMinis: Web2Bar

Your Minis: Web2Bar

(7) Leave Valuable Comments and Reviews

You might not like taking the time to leave thoughtful reviews and comments, but this is what needs to be done to be a successful social networker. Think about it, don’t you like people more when they are nice to you? I know that I like someone much better when they say nice things to me, especially when they are saying nice things about the articles I wrote or the site that I designed. Try only writing comments that you really mean, don’t be insincere, people will see right through the smoke.

(8) Tag Effectively

Make sure to take your time and tag your articles and sites effectively. These tags / keywords are how people find you. Take some time out to see how other people are tagging and copy methodology that seems to work.

(9) Titles That Catch the Reader’s Eyes

Unless people find your article’s title titillating , they won’t click on it. Even if your article is just so-so, if you spin the title in a way that makes it sound exciting, you will get people to click through to read it.

(10) Content is King

Nothing is more important than content. If you are a good writer and you write about interesting topics, you are going to do well on the social networking sites. People seem to like top 10 lists, top 20 lists, etc. I suggest that you look at digg.com to see what gets the most diggs. I have failed multiple times on getting a post digged or stumbled, even when I thought that it was the best article ever. You don’t always win.

THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IS THAT YOU KEEP AT IT AND DON’T GIVE UP … YOU WILL SUCCEED!

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