Increasing Blog Traffic with Digg
May 21, 2009 by Spencer Spellman · 9 Comments
Today, more than ever, “anyone who is anyone” is active in social media. Although Facebook may be king, there are other tools that it is imperative to at least understand, if not actively use — including Digg. Over the next couple paragraphs I’m going to discuss whether you can increase your blog traffic with Digg, and if so, how to do it.
If you’re not familiar with Digg, it’s imperative that you first understand it before just jumping into it. Digg is a cross between a social networking site and a social bookmarking site.
Users submit new links in the form of articles, photos or videos to Digg and then other users can vote it up or down, known as a digg or bury, and then also comment. The more diggs a link receives, the more likely it is to appear on Digg’s front page, and therefore, the more page views it gets.
Although it sounds pretty simple, there’s more to Digg then meets the eye. If you want to use Digg to just submit all your blog posts, then just keep moving on because Digg’s close-knit community is sure to find you out and your Digg life will be short lived. Because Digg is social, the most important part of it is engaging with others.
When first getting on Digg, before submitting your own content, spend at least a few weeks submitting other links, digging, commenting and building a network. As you’re doing this, make sure you’re writing quality posts and building a community on your blog as well. You ultimately want to do this because the power of Digg is found in not one user submitting links for a domain, but many users submitting many different links from a website.
Once you’ve built up a network of at least 50 active users, preferably 100, and the links you submit are being dugg and commented on, then you can consider submitting your own posts. However, don’t just start submitting every one of your posts or even every other post. Start by submitting 5% of your new posts. Make sure that you’re analyzing your traffic to see if you’re actually getting traffic from Digg when you start doing this.
Of course if you’re not getting any traffic, then you need to spend time elsewhere. If you are getting traffic, make sure you’re writing high quality posts so that users come back and even start submitting your posts themselves. You can increase the chance of this occurring by putting a Digg button on each of your posts.
Finally, Digg can increase traffic to your blog indirectly, by adding SEO value. Unlike many social sites, Digg doesn’t put a nofollow tag on submitted links, which adds SEO value by building links, which in turn can mean a higher rank on Google.
So are you a Digger? Have you been dugg? Share your success stories about how Digg has helped you.
I’m a digger and Ive dug it for a while, think it has had some effect on my rankings and now I always try to add Digg to my clients web design.Get on the Dig train!
never tried any of this before.. but will do some steps from now on!.. cheers
There are lots of discussions out there on the internet whether Digg or StumbleUpon brings more traffic. I read that StumbleUpon link can bring visitors in a long tail manner, whilst Digg performs better in the first few day generating a traffic rush.
In my personal opinion Digg is better. Leastwise for me
Hi , Thanks for sharing such informative article , it will really help for new webmasters to understand internet traffic sources like digg
Thanks for this article to help me understand what digg is.
I have seen many bloggers sharing the same topic and results with Digg and StumbleUpon, I think I have to try it now…
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never tried this before, will do, thanks
I agree with WebDev, I think digg results in an initial traffic rush but then slows down dramatically (when the story becomes old, etc), while on the other hand stumbleupon is more of a steady flow of traffic…Unless of course you are constantly posting new blog entries and can keep submitting your posts to digg, then quite frankly it doesn’t matter which bookmarking site you use. Anyone know whether stumbleupon allows link following?