An Extensive Look at Digg.com and Digg Marketing

By: Barry Dunlop     Topics: Blog,Driving Traffic

Digg.com is one of the most popular social media websites on the net. If you know what you are doing it can be a huge source of free traffic to your website or blog. Today we are going to cover everything you need to know about Digg and Digg marketing/exploitation.

How does Digg Work?

Digg allows users to submit content to the community, this community then judges the quality of that content.

They do this with votes, also known as “diggs”, the opposite is known as “burying”.

There are many rules and algorithms that determine how popular the content becomes, but it is mainly based on votes. The ultimate goal is for the content to reach the frontpage. This tends to drive huge bursts of web visitors to your website.

How Does Digg Benefit Webmasters?

Digg can give you a platform to the world. It can let you spread your message and tell your story. However, if your message is not worth listening to, you will not get heard.

As a webmaster or blogger, the main benefit of using Digg is to get huge promotion for free. Before Digg arrived, there was no way of getting worldwide coverage for free, this allows small site owners and bloggers to compete with the big boys.

My Digg Experiences

I have been on the Digg homepage many times. In one example I received over 247,000 unique visitors to my website in a period of 7 days.

This huge burst of website visitors was hugely beneficial to my site, and it got me hundreds of backlinks, which still helps my Google rankings to this day.

On average I find a Digg success brings 50,000 visits, and around 200 backlinks.

4 Steps to Getting on the Digg Homepage

All of your Digg success or failure is determined before you hit the “publish” button. So here are some areas you need to look into:

* A great headline – Your headline must be catchy and attractive. Digg users like sensational headlines, and ideally you want to build curiosity through your headline.

* A unique and interesting angle to the story or message – There are billions of webpages on the net, how can you make your story or content stand out from the crowd? Aim to make your content different. Find a new angle, and think outside the box. For example, there was a recent article entitled: Retirement lessons we can learn from Britney Spears.

* Keep It Simple! – You need to use the KISS test: (Keep It Simple Stupid). This means that your message or story should be easy for everyone to understand.

* Solid formatting of the content – Don’t use huge paragraphs and big blocks of text. You can make your content easy to read by using shorter paragraphs, bold text, bullet point lists and images.

What type of content does well on Digg?

1) Anything with a unique angle does well.

2) Novelty content is hugely popular. For example, there was a recent story about a kitten with two heads.

3) Geek content – Apple, iphone, Linux, Mac, web design, Google, etc… Digg users love this stuff, so give it to them!

4) Lists – 10 step guides, 101 reasons to, 35 marketing tips etc…

Summary

You now should have enough information to succeed with Digg.com, however, before you get started you should monitor the Digg site for a few weeks and get familiar with it.

Also, use the Digg search feature and type your keyword into it. Look at the stories from your industry and look at what works in your niche.

See you on the frontpage 😉