Digg, Netscape, Reddit, Newsvine and others allow community members to share and rate news stories. They are primary news sources and influential outlets that must be considered by marketers. But don’t expect to post your old-school press release and get a good response! Learn how these sites work and how to best tailor your message for maximum visibility on them.
Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land
Speakers:
- Neil Patel, CTO, Advantage Consulting Services
- Chris Winfield, President & Co-founder, 10e20
- Tamar Weinberg, Search Marketing Strategist, Rusty Brick, Inc.
First up: Neil Patel
Digg:why should we care?
- He has experienced over 129 unique links and over 10,000 visits in one hour after being on digg homepage
Requirements for succeeding with Digg
- Content, Video, or Audio
Important factors:
- it’s a voting system
- Time - 100 votes in 100 days is not as good as 100 votes in 1 hour
- Voters - who votes can count more or less
- Submitters - submitters with good reputation have more “power” to submit successful articles
- Friends - the more, the better
Unwritten rules
- don’t promote yourself (or don’t get caught)
- don’t pay for diggs
- Don’t spam
- No SEOs allowed: digg is not SEO friendly - so lie
Fun Facts
- only 0.7% of stories make the home page
- Top 100 users control 56% of the home page
- You can’t control what the community says
Next Up: Tamar Weinberg
Advice for Content that Wins
- quizzes
- “what kind of transformer are you?”
- Tools
- Pictures
- Breaking News
- Try to avoid “buy now” messages
Advice for Promotion as a Digg User: Networking
- Make yourself memorable - create an avatar
- Digg is a fickle crowd
- Network and make friends
More Networking
- Contact people offline (outside of Digg)
Tools
- Use tools to enhance your experience
- for example, use a firefox toolbar to submit pages to digg, as it is faster than submitting through the web interface. You can also monitor your story
Things to Note
- don’t be an SEO, don’t have SEO on your content submitted to Digg
- try to be diverse: don’t get the same people digging your stories all the time
Lesser Known Tricks
- Focus on a category: eg. It takes less diggs to be on the “Science” homepage
Next up: Chris Winfield
Why use Digg?
- can get up to 10,000 visitors
- bloggers are always looking for new content, and so turn to digg for ideas
- links remain for a long time
Understand the digg landscape
- FTW - “For the win”
- “i can has”
- RTFA - read the (F) article
Know what Diggers Like
- Heroes
- ipod
And don’t like
- Mr. Bush
- Sales
What not to do:
- Sell
- Fake it
What Works:
- Knowing your market
- Blendec: Using Blenders to destroy things
- Dove Campaign: showing how models get edited in photoshop
- Lists
- Get featured on a popular blog
The same site can have vastly different results, depending on positioning
Plan
- keep your niche in mind
- Use beautiful pictures, video, and cool facts
- Strip out sidebar navigation, etc.
Submitting to digg:
- need a definitive title
- use numbers instead of numbers written in words: eg. “11″ instead of “eleven”
- Description: highlight key points (people don’t generally read the content)
- Choosing the right topic: your story can be buried simply by being in the wrong topic
- Start a conversation
Spreading to Social Networks
- Stumbleupon: digg stories get stumbled, and remain in their index
- Stories can spread to influential blogs
Success
one story:
- 100,000 visitors in 24 hours
- 1,000 links in Yahoo
- 200 new email list signups
One Digg tip to live by:
- Have good hosting: if the site crashes, there’s no story