o! Just Me

Being a digerati who always try to be in the forefront of technology adoption, I knew Digg ever since it became public. I used to watch just the front page for news, links, new innovations and old glory stories. Later, I subscribes to their RSS Feed for promoted stories and was very satisfied being informed about the happenings around me through other diggers. Moreover, I was never interested in knowing the How and What of Digging. I did digg for stories coupla times on some good Upcoming stories, I never bothered if they got promoted to the front page.

My first submission (almost a year ago) was about The Magic Framerate in Flash. It never got dugg more than the few from fellow Flashers. Even after more story submission, I could never understand why and how stories get good attention. I gave up and stop submitting stories. However, I keep digging stories occasionally but half-heartedly.

Well, then few articles started to pop up on the Digg Front page that caught my attention. They were all on how to Digg your stories to the Front Page, How to get your stories promoted. I decided to learn, studied about them and yes, I was able to digg stories to the Front Page.

My first story that got dugg to the front page was 101 ways to organize your life. After that, I have been rather successful in getting stories dugg to the Front Page. My overall ranking is 709 at the time of writing this article. Perhaps, the article that really make me try to have some successful submits was Top 10 Actionable Tips (Rules) That Make Me Top Digg User. Afterwards, I saw many related stories of How to get your stories to the Digg Front Page.

I did try to follow most of them. However, some of the most applicable and true facts that I followed and got successful were not all the rules/guides at all. Let me phrase out some of the important ones according to my experience (they are not in any particular order at all). And yes, I may be more successful if I can follow all the other guides, tips.

FRIENDS
Friends indeed play a great role on Digg. When I started off seriously on Digg (few weeks back), the first thing I did was to find friends. I made friends with diggers who digg my stories. I keep making friends along the way and I saw that my stories are getting good attention. This is the same with me, I would eventually prioritize either Dugg or Submitted stories from my Friends than the other diggers. Looking at the Dug Upcoming for everyone will be impossible. I spend about 2 hours each day on Digg and even for friends, Page 1 to 10 is the max that I can go and I am sure will be very similar for other Diggers. Oh Yes, invite new friends. They definitely becomes your friend and they will look at your stories first.

TITLES & DESCRIPTION
They play an extremely important role. Many good stories never got dugg because of titles that are not descriptive enough. When one submit a story to digg, make sure the title is best enough to describe the story. The description is to back-up the title. Many a times, unless the title is some kick ass Title, I have to think over, re-edit many times till I came to the final title. The character length cut-off for the title on Digg is never enough for me to get the message across. It goes the same with me as a user/digger. Being a regular digger now, I scan the titles first, if they are good enough, I DIGG it and then read the article. If not satisfied with the Title, I read the description, DIGG it then read the article. If both are not appealing, I do not even click to that article. Ok, let me prove this.

• 404 Research Lab Everything about 404 Page Not Found got promoted to the Front Page. Yes, I submitted the story despite the fact that it had been submitted about 5 to 6 times before with the same URL. Nonetheless, my submission got promoted. I am pretty sure the Title and the Description have lots to do here. The title was elaborate enough, back-up by the description.
• When I submitted Would you add buttons to add to all the Social Networking sites?, it was already submitted coupla time though with the original title. I decided to change the title and be descriptive. I remember running out of the Title Character limit here too. And of course, it got promoted.
• So was the article, 1 addon to make all your old extensions compatible with Firefox 2. I saw it to be duplicate stories when I submitted but instead of digging the submission, I went ahead, change the Title, gave the description and viola, it got promoted.
• There were many submission and I saw one with the original title Virtual Stan. Comeon, how will one get interested with that, so I continue with my submission but changed the title, Make him smile, smirk or even box him and description to suit what the story is about. It never got a good amount of digg but it got some people interested and was promoted to the Front page.

So, till now, 50% of my promoted stories are duplicate stories. Go figure.

TYPE OF STORIES
I knew from the beginning that it will be impossible for me to compete for top, hot and happening stories of the United States (where major diggers are). There are already smart American doing that. So, I diverted my concentration on good archived stories without really giving up on current happenings. I subscribe to a whole bunch of RSS feeds that delivers stories as fast as any American would get. Well, what I am trying to say is that good archived old stories are welcomed by diggers too. Luckily, I think 3 of my stories which got promoted were new current stories. Funnily, I also re-read my own blog?s archive looking for good stories that people might like. Of course, many of my submissions are links that I found on my own archives.

TIME
People say about timing for good diggs - when the States goes to work. But I’m not so sure about this as I find that, many diggers are up in the night which is daytime my time (INDIA). But yes, weekends show a good trend of slowdown.

And here are my personal observation about Digg.

It is not a secret at all that Digg drives massive traffic to your site. So, don?t be surprised when SEOs talked about Digg, Reddit, Netscape while discussing Google and Search Engine related topics about your website.

I don?t know why “Health Care and Fitness Website Marketing Tips (Health Care and Fitness Website Marketing Tips)”:http://www.firstpagefitness.com/blog/ will blog about Digg? Well, to get dugg of course, they wrote a story specially on Digg Users, Top 41 Diggers and What They Digg The Most. There is nothing wrong with it, it is just the trend that I am discovering.

I?m not sure why Digg do not allow clickable hyperlinks to your Website/blog from your Digg Profile? This makes it impossible to track links coming directly from Digg?s Profile page and thus makes it difficult to find out how useful is your profile page and the links there. You cannot even find out what happens to your profile when your stories are promoted to the Front Page of Digg.

Note

• I currently subscribe to over 1500+ RSS feeds of which I regularly read just about 100 of them.
• If your Feed Reader allows you to watch feeds, keep a watch over current happening. Anyway, I was always late and have never been successful in submitting hot stories. I have to just digg them as my friends would have already submitted the same. I use NetNewsFire on Mac and the equivalent on Windows is FeedDaemon . Both allows Watch for topics that you are interested.

References

• How To Get to the TOP of Digg
• 8 Ways to Help You Get to Digg?s Front Page