The 10 Commandments for Marketing Your site on Digg

2008-11-24T21:17:00.009-05:00

Never submit pages from your own sites. Never Digg anything from your own sites. This is the most important rule of all, so this is why it is first. If you follow nothing else on this list, at least follow this single most important rule.
Create a proper profile with an image and links to your websites and profiles on other social networks. Your profile is an important part of your site activities. It allows people to get to know who you are and more about you. The default image provided by Digg doesn't make a good impression on anyone. A properly filled out profile invites social interaction. Digg is a social site. It's important to be social. Most of the traffic I get directly from Digg is people visiting my sites through links on my profile.
Avoid using the Digg shout system as much as possible. Even if you keep your shouts private, people and search engines can still see and find them. These shouts can hurt you. It can be viewed by some people and search engines as a form of spamming.
Make friends with your Digg mutual friends on other social sites that have a private message system in which private messages are never made public and accessible to search engines. Or even better, use instant messaging and email, instead.
Get your Digg friends to submit your content for you, and don’t use the same person too frequently…rotate them. (use the private message system on other sites to suggest what to submit and Digg) And not every page on your site is a worthy candidate for submission. Be selective and only give them links to the best content you have on your site. Be very critical of your own work. You know what will appeal to the masses and what won't. Don't act like you are stupid. Don't submit things that will likely only get a few Diggs. This will hurt your site, in the long run when your content is submitted to Digg and gets a low number of Diggs. Google rates your content in part, by the number of Diggs it receives. Choose wisely.
Get real friends that are also members of Digg to submit and/or Digg your stuff. (same thing…contact them offsite) Make sure those friends are not connected to your Digg profile in any way.
Digg a big variety of content submitted by others (not just your friends), from the upcoming section, and don’t Digg anything lame. Think massive quantities of mass appeal. Ask yourself the following: "What would the majority of people assume about me if they were to see this in my Digg history?" If it's not something good, don't Digg it, even if you really like it.
Make sure you comment and say something intelligent that won’t get voted down, on at least 50% of what you Digg. Commenting and interacting with others is being social. You need to be social on a social network, or it just won't work. You want to be one of the first few to comment as frequently as possible, and you don't want to seem like you are some sort of idiot. And vote up the intelligent comments that you like, made by others. The more you are an early commenter with something intelligent to say, and the more social you are, the more likely it will be that you will catch the eye of a more powerful Digger that likes you for what you have to say and what you Digg, and he will be more likely to check out the other things you Digg, and then possibly Digg things that you Digg. More powerful Diggers have crowd appeal that you don’t. Their followers are what you are after and you get to those through them.
Do not attempt to friend the top dogs on Digg until you have established a very strong profile and have an abundance of experience. They are not going to friend you back if they don't know who you are and have never seen you around the site. An even better idea is to wait for them to friend you, first.
Never friend anyone on Digg that breaks the above rules. Remember the old saying "Birds of a feather flock together". Don't mark yourself as "guilty through association". Anyone that breaks the above rules are poor quality Diggers and their activities can get you marked as a spammer or poor quality Digger, yourself, and then either your account will get banned, you submissions will get constantly buried, or people just won’t Digg your stuff. If that happens, then you will be useless to your mutual Digg friends, and they will not be willing to help you as much. They may even stop following you. Leave the poor quality Diggers that break the above rules as just followers and not mutual friends. Don’t follow them or you will be following them to failure. Associate yourself only with quality.

And what kinds of things should you submit and Digg besides the usual stuff that has mass appeal, and content of good quality from your friends? Submit and Digg high quality pages that link to yours. Your goal should be indirect traffic coming from those sites to yours and not from Digg to yours. This is one easy way you can reward people that are kind enough to write about you. You give those pages more traffic and a boost in page rank and have more links pointing to you in the top 10 results in the search engines.

The goal is not to get a day of traffic from Digg. The goal is not to increase your own page rank for your site (this will happen any way if you follow my suggestions). The goal is not for your site to make the front page of Digg.

The goal is to take over the entire front page of the search engines so all links will point to you, directly or indirectly when someone searches for something.

Most people never go to page 2 of the results. They usually find what they want on page 1. If every article on page 1 sends them to you, you WIN BIG TIME, even if your site is buried on page 8 of the search results, which it won’t be if you are paying attention and learning from what I just said.

The higher the page rank of the sites that link to you, the higher your page rank will be. Why have a bunch of PR0 sites linking to you when you can actively do something about it and help turn them into PR3 or higher? This is one case where nice guys don't have to finish last. Being nice can help you finish first.

My #1 Reason for Hating Digg

2008-07-24T14:09:00.009-04:00

Aside from all that infects Digg and makes it such trash, such as the Super Digger cartels that bury the good stuff and digg the crappy stuff without even reading it, the fact anything with "Google", "Digg", "iPhone", or "Linux" in the headline automatically makes it to the front page (even if it isn't news worthy), and the comments that seem like they were written by a gang of uneducated pre-teen delinquents that live under a bridge...there is one thing above all that really aggrivates me to no end.

THE BLOAT!

The site is the most unusable piece of trash that has ever been coded. Worse than AOL webmail, the latest version of GMail, Yahoo webmail, Neopets, and FeedBurner, combined.

It should not take 20 minutes to log into a site. One should not receive a billion "unresponsive script" warnings per page. It should not take an hour to switch tabs. Someone needs to dig a hole and bury that site before I lose my mind. I am so aggrivated right now that all the Kitaro in the world could not calm me down.

Every time I think about giving Digg another chance, I end up regretting it and shaking with frustration. I am a very patient person, but I am not THAT patient.

I seriously hope that if Google does buy Digg, that they don't turn their search engine into a bloated mess while they add Digg buttons to all their search results. My poor little computer and I wouldn't be able to handle it, and in my opinion, we shouldn't have to.

I have had it! Enough is enough! I will never load another page from Digg in any browser, on any PC, for as long as I live...unless someone can direct me to a Digg Lite that isn't loaded with all the bloated crap.

I don't care if I can vote or comment on stuff, or not. I really am not feeling in a very social mood right now, any way.

I just want a list of the headlines, descriptions, and direct links to all the articles that have been submitted in the upcoming stories section. I would like to find some interesting stuff to read that isn't already plastered all over every blog & splog in creation.

I don't want the front page crap. I would rather have all the hidden gems that never have a fair shot of making it to the front page.

Does such a thing even exist?

If it does, give me a link, please!

UPDATE 08-04-2008: I have found not one, but two alternatives to the main bloated Digg site. Please see my article titled "Digg, Digg Lite, Digg Ultra Lite" on my Snailware blog.

Cranial Soup

The 10 Commandments for Marketing Your site on Digg

My #1 Reason for Hating Digg