How I Doubled My Digg Popular Stories Stat
social media March 6th. 2008, 6:00amA couple of months ago I wrote a post called Digg’s Too Big of a Gig for Me to Dig, in which I complained about the sheer amount of time and work that I thought it was going to take to hit the front page again. I was kind of discouraged at that time.
As of March 5/08, I have hit Digg’s front page three times in the past five days. I’ve doubled my front page hits in this time frame. While six “popular” stories in nine months isn’t necessarily a huge accomplishment, the fact that three of them were in the last week does stand out in my mind.
Here are some things that I’ve tried doing differently of late:
- Quality/fit of story – I’ve really tried to hone in on the type of stories that large numbers of Diggers would enjoy
- Headline and description – trying to make both of these as interesting as I can
- Comments – popular stories generally get the most comments and vice versa. I’ve tried to start and stimulate conversations in the comments section of my submissions.
- Time of submission – I used to submit most stories early in the morning. I’m notw experimenting with different times/day
- Use of shouting – for a couple of weeks I was doing a lot of shouting. I’ve cut way back.
- Connecting with other Diggers/social media types – lots of this going on.
Something in that list is helping. Probably more than one thing.
Interesting developments.
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March 6th, 2008 at 10:45 am
Great tips Mark. I will have to take more time over at Digg and give some of those a try.
March 6th, 2008 at 11:30 am
Hey Mark..I’m glad to hear you are fairing well over in Diggerland. Me personally? I can’t stand the load time..You know me, I’m a true blue Stumbleupon friend for sure..Oh and the newest obsession would be Mixx..But I’m sure these tips can be applied at these places as well. Have fun doing it!
March 6th, 2008 at 11:42 am
The volume as Dosh and many others have said isn’t there for Mixx. At Digg you can get to the front page and get 50,000 hits at least. Mixx, maybe you’re lucky with 200 at most?
Digg is the King of social media.
March 6th, 2008 at 11:48 am
@Kristen - of course my stories are sucking today - it comes and it goes
@SpostareDuro - load time is a real pain at times, I agree. I really like StumbleUpon as well. Mixx interests me at times, but it comes and goes.
@Michael Lodispoto - no question that Mixx sends a small fraction of Digg’s traffic, but that’s not always a bad thing.
March 6th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
The people I know that are successful on Digg practically live out of it, with loads of similarly Digg-wedded friends at their disposal.
My experiences of getting to the front page of Digg has been that the secondary traffic sources are more valuable than those visiting from Digg itself…
March 6th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
@Wayne - can you comment further about these secondary sources?
March 6th, 2008 at 7:16 pm
So many of the pages I see on Digg are designed to look like something interesting… many are like tabloid stories.. big promise, little meat.
And the traffic is about the same.. big numbers, few doing much more than looking at the story and then moving on.
The promise of social media is real connections with real people.. not gross numbers of eyeballs.
March 6th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
@Warren Whitlock - agreed, I think social media’s value is in making those connections, which is why it will be hard for large businesses to use it successfully.
March 6th, 2008 at 8:44 pm
It would seem that the more you try to get on digg, the less you focus on the story. Kind of like trying to make a viral video vs. making a video that goes viral. Focus on the quality and one would hope the rest follows suit.
Yeah, this would read stronger if I was part of the big digg. But from personal experience my traffic flows from my focus on good content vs. gaming the system.
Either way, interesting post. Thanks!
March 6th, 2008 at 9:10 pm
@Kevin Dugan - I’m completely fascinated by the whole concept of “going viral”. The sad thing is that for every successful meme, craze, or innovation, there are probably thousands of other worthy pieces of content that never see the light of day due to human bandwidth limitations (ugly phrase, that.) There’s an interesting “chicken and egg” scenario here - creating good content vs. being recognized as a good content creator. Ultimately, creating good content should be the best path to success, but I wonder how many other successful creators would have emerged with the right exposure.
May 5th, 2008 at 6:01 am
[...] I know that in my own experience, I used to submit Digg stories early in the morning (my time) and I seemed to have better success when I submitted stories at different times of day. [...]