How to use Digg for Business
What is Digg?
Digg is a social news site. It relies on users to submit recent content that other users may find relevant at a given moment; members of the community then vote on what is most relevant at the time. If other users like the content, then they can "digg" (vote for) it. If they do not like it, they can "bury" (vote against) it. The more diggs a page gets, the higher it ranks on Digg. The most widely dugg articles appear on the Digg home page, which gets a lot of traffic.
What Digg is Good For
Digg can be a great resource for finding out the most relevant news and stories. Where with Delicious you bookmark to save it and come back later, Digg is most likely to contain article that you don't plan on coming back to but found the article interesting and worthy to share with others. It is because of this nature that Digg is usually more news and entertainment than tools and detailed how to tutorials.
Digg makes it extremely easy to share worthwhile content to your network of friends through the "shout" feature. Links from Digg also provide SEO value so for your absolute best content it is a link of value.
Business Goals on Digg
For a business, there are three primary goals for using Digg:
- Submitted content provides an inbound link to a deep page on your site.
- Send interesting individuals to your site.
- If you strike gold and make it to the front page you can get thousands of visits and generate links from other bloggers writing about your content.
If you can get an article to the first page of Digg, you'll get a lot of traffic-10,000 or more clicks-with a possible side effect of generating hundreds of links from those who found it interesting. Although the traffic you get from Digg is not usually going to deliver a lot of highly qualified leads, the links you get from this traffic will ultimately help you to gain authority and improve your rank for keywords you are targeting. It will also help you on other social media sites. Finally, keep in mind that Digg's audience is mostly men between the age of 18-39 so keep this in mind as part of your strategy.
Note: Getting onto the first page is extremely unlikely and hard to do for an unseasoned digg users.
How to Set up Digg
- Go to the Digg Homepage and in the top left hand corner click Join Digg.
- Complete the required fields in the Create an Account form. Choose a username that will help your contacts recognize you if possible. Identity is more important than keywords.
- Click Continue. Digg sends an account registration email to the address you provided on the form.
- Open the registration email and confirm your registration.
How to Promote Your Content on Digg
Follow these steps to submit an article.
- Go to Digg's Submit a New Link page.
- Enter the URL and media type for the article. Click Continue.
- If you are the first person to submit your content to Digg, you can customize your submission to encourage click-through. As you enter information and select characteristics and tags for the page, your changes are reflected in the Preview pane at the bottom of the page.
- Review the preview for your submission. When you're satisfied that it will bring the most click-throughs to the article, click Submit.
Once you submit an article, it's added to the "Upcoming" section for Digg as a whole as well as Upcoming pages for the topic and subtopic areas you've identified. You can track the progress of your article and see how many diggs it's received. Articles stay on the Upcoming list for less than a day.
