Blogg³ – a blog about blogging.

To Digg Or Not To Digg? June 9, 2008

When you’ve completed a post on your blog, don’t instinctively reach for the Digg button. Think it over. There are many factors that determinate how popular a story will get on Digg. Here’s when you should and when you shouldn’t submit a story.

Digg:

• If you are a popular digg user. This is one of the most important things. You need to have hundreds of people add you as a friend, just being someone’s fan won’t get you any friendly diggs. If you have thousands of friends, you’re already an authority. Diggers love to digg famous user’s posts.
• If the story is interesting. Submit only the better half of your posts.
• Lists. Diggers love lists. Top 10′s and Worst 5′es will do very well. Try to include the numbers in the header, they tend to make the story stick out from a pageful of plain text titles.
• If you find any good posts by other people, submit them. This will get you fans and give the site some free traffic.

No Digg:

• If you’re not a Digg power-user, don’t digg your posts yourself. Get a popular friend to submit them, or if they don’t want to, pay someone to do it. The more friends a user has, the more frindly diggs their story will gather.
• NEVER submit any site announcements to get the odd visitor-or-two, except contests and other interesting things. People hate to see things like “Sorry for my site being down yesterday, I accidentally deleted my wordpress template…” or “We now have a new web host…”. That certainly won’t get you any authority – and if done often, might even lose you some fans.
• Don’t submit when most of your readers are offline. The working hours (approx. 09.00-17.00) are the time when most people are online. Make sure you keep timezones in mind, as most of your audience could possibly live far from your country. Use a free tracker, such as StatCounter or Google Analytics to find out how much people visit your site and where they’re from.
• Don’t submit all your stories yourself. Give your readers a chance as well. If you’re lucky, a Digg power-user might stumble on your site and decide to submit an article. In that case, you might even be looking at the front page of Digg!

A good thing is to shout out to your friends after submitting a top-class post, but don’t torture them with several unimporant shouts a day. That’s also a good way of losing friends on Digg. Also, remember to submit to the most relevant category or you’ll end up annoying people.

So, follow these guidelines and add me as a friend! (Yes, thats a great way to get fans. Put a link to your account on your blog.)

Hello world! June 7, 2008

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