A Beginners Guide to Digg

Digg (www.digg.com) is a social linking site with a difference. That difference being that people can vote on other people’s submissions. Once you have read this I hope you will know that little bit more about Digg and the “Digg Effect“.

How Digg Works

A positive vote will rank the site higher and a negative vote will rank the site lower. A site that gets more positive diggs in a short space of time will rank higher than a site that gets the same number of diggs in a longer period of time (like radio active decay). The Digg algorithm isn’t so well disclosed, but it’s thought that there is a certain weight attached to someone’s digg vote. A user who has gotten on the front page, or has had successful topics on Digg has more weight on their vote compared with someone who has just joined their community.

Why Digg Works

Digg can be great to generate a bit of a ‘buzz’ around your blog. If people think your site is interesting/funky/worthy of their vote, other people are likely to think so too. This initial traffic can be a great way of getting regular readers as well as getting links from other blogs.

logo by Jeba (digg logo tutorial)

How Digg can work for you

Digg can bring some serious amount of traffic, if you get on the homepage you can be guaranteed around 100k visitors in just one day. Granted this peak will be short lived, but the effects of increase in traffic might mean you get more people to subscribe to your RSS feed. And you might get a mention on other peoples websites, news sites or even TV (okay it’s a long shot, but it’s possible !). Digg users are not typically well known for increasing revenue for a site, as they are pretty much ad-aware, so don’t be planning on getting rich quick from AdSense or the likes.

Tips on how to submit to Digg

Digg is a fun website, with interesting topics (both serious and not serious). It is your job when submitting an article on your blog post you’ve written to do the following things:

1. Pick a catchy/witty/short topic title. Have a look at the typical titles for topics on Digg at the moment.
2. Precise description, make sure you say why this submitted piece is so great.
3. Sit back and wait, if it is your article don’t be afraid to add a link to the digg to encourage diggs.
4. If you are not successful, try again in a week.

It doesn’t really make sense to submit everything your write, because typically your posts are not so ground breaking for the people on Digg. A general rule of thumb is, if it’s worth talking about and it’s new, then put it on Digg.

Further Digg Reading

Here is a [great article from Glen] about how the top 100 blogs on Technorati have made it to the front page of Digg a total of 8,000 times. This reinforces the fact that being on digg can strengthen your presence online. And another article [here] guide you through the submission steps.

My Digg

My digg profile is [here], feel free to add me as a friend. And if you really like this article you digg it by going to http://digg.com/tech_news/5_min_Guide_to_Digg_Submissions .