More than a million individuals visit Digg’s front page and sift through the stories each day. A story that reaches the front page will be “hit” with a maelstrom of 10-20K unique visitors within a matter of hours, a phenomenon so incredible that it received its own name - the “Digg effect”, and is known to bring webservers to their virtual knees. However, getting enough votes to reach the front page proved to be an almost impossible feat. In this article we wanted to show a new, different approach for getting an audience for your cause with Digg - an approach that is ethical, effective and quite fulfilling.

Many users try to tap into the shortlist of Digg’s viewers and promote their own content, just to find that it is much harder than it seems. Out of the 4000 articles submitted daily to Digg, only a hundred, one in forty, reach the front page. Even the top Digg users, who know every nook and cranny, can’t seem to get more than 25% of their stories to the front page. The usual case for a casual story submitter is to have his article ignored completely, without even a single vote, ignoring the article’s possibly superb content.

On first sight, it may seem that the Digg social editorial experience is limited to none but the site’s “top dogs” but this is far from true. If you really believe in your cause and are ready to invest time to promote it within the Digg community, we can offer a method with which you can make sure your cause receives the attention it deserves.The best part? there is no magic involved and everyone can do it once they realize that Digg is not a promotional tool, but a cutting-edge social news website that is the creation of many selfless people invested there for several years now. Work with it and be a part of the Digg community, join the debate, introduce actual content into the conversation, intrigue and engage the community and you will get a real chance to convince that your cause is digg-worthy. The results can be sensational.

We propose a three-step process: attract a cause-conscious community within Digg, get involved in Digg and be active in promoting your cause.

1. Attract a cause-conscious community within Digg.
   Start by befriending with the diggers that identify with your cause. After all, what a better way to get votes for your cause than by making it visible to those that identify with it? One way to find diggers who identify with your cause is to search Digg for stories related to your cause and befriend with the submitters of the stories and the users that voted for them. “Befriending” is not just clicking on the “add friend” button. Just like in the real world, you will need to take time getting to know your friends and their interests. If you want your friends to take the time and read your submitted content, make sure you do the same for them - read stories submitted by your friends, contribute to the conversation and digg their articles if you find them newsworthy. You may be tempted to digg articles just because they were submitted by your friends: don’t do this blindly. “Blind digging” behavior is destructive to the website and will probably get you banned for good. Tip: remember to contribute to articles that haven’t yet reached the front page. You’ll be helping your friends more as they need your diggs to reach the front page, and you’ll also get better placement for your comments due to the lower general participation in the upcoming section. If these articles do reach the front page, you’ll get some nice exposure for your own contribution.
2. Get involved in Digg.
   Being an advocate, you surely have more involvement and understanding on your cause than most people do. Make it a habit to submit content relevant to your cause, join the online discussion and contribute from your knowledge wherever possible. Keep digging submissions relevant to your cause. You will attract new fans by being the first to submit interesting, relevant content. Tip: if you find that a story you want to submit was already submitted, digg it and befriend with the submitter and diggers.
3. Be active in promoting your cause.
   Make sure that the crucial stories get all the attention you can attract. Click “share” to shout about them to all friends and make sure they don’t miss them, just be careful to avoid becoming an annoyance. As you keep investing time in building your Digg friendships, you’ll notice that it becomes easier and easier to attract a large number of voters to review your articles and help them get into Digg’s front page.

Last but not least - set your expectations. Even after all the work and time investment in Digg, you shouldn’t expect all of your important submissions to reach the front page. As mentioned before, the top 100 Digg power-users get only one in every four of their submitted articles to the front page. But if done passionately, over time, your more interesting submissions will attract several dozens of Digg friends. Not enough to get you to the front page, but enough to rise above the mass of daily submissions, exposing your cause’s content to a broader audience getting a real opportunity of reaching the front page - and into the hearts and minds of millions and millions of Digg readers.

Hope to see you soon, active on Digg!

Why we dig Digg (or: what is Digg)?

Digg.com is an amazing accomplishment. What started as a modest experiment at trying to give the masses editorial controls, grew to be one of the largest and most influential online news sites. With more than 20 million people viewing the website each month, the three years old news site attracts more viewers than all other online news websites, save for one (CNN). All around the web, bloggers, website owners, political candidates and marketing execs soon realized that a real opportunity resides in the number of viewers their content could attract if it reached Digg’s front page.

Digg is a social news website. Users go to Digg’s front page to read the news of the day, but if they wish, they can also help determine which stories reach the front page by submitting potential news items and voting for others. Once a story is submitted by a user, any user, it is instantly posted in Digg’s upcoming section, where it waits for the community’s judgment. Users can decide which stories reach the front page by visiting the upcoming section and ‘Digging’, voting for, stories they like. A story will reach the front page if it receives enough ‘diggs’. Digg also allows users to socialize between themselves. Users can customize their own personal Digg webpage, acquaint themselves and socialize with other users, create friendships and see what their Digg friends are up to.

All in all, Digg is a pioneer in social media and is one of the key contributers in making social media what it is today.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 24th, 2007 at 8:57 am and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.