Saturday, 6th January 2007
Building a Digg Culture
Everyone in the blogosphere likes to get noticed. Earlier people considered being slashdotted as the ultimate honour of online recognition. Lately with sites such as digg and reddit and other popular web 2.0 news-sites coming to the fore, the focus of bloggers has shifted a bit.
Whether the attention generated when a blog post is dugg is enough to cause a reader to re-visit the site is debatable. I think it's been pretty much proven that any traffic a site gets from digg is fleeting and doesn't translate into long-term traffic however I think there is much more value for the blogger than the initial burst of traffic.
Sure it generates a lot of traffic for the website but if they have a business model that is solely ad-based then having your website dugg would not generate any money for you. I mean, how many digg users would click an ad even if it was relevant? Some of the obvious benefits of building a Digg Culture on your blog include the fact that you get Fresh RSS subscribers and Newsletter subscribers.
Every time a blog gets dugg a leap is noticed in RSS subscriber count. Similarly newsletter subscribers (if you have one) will generally get a bump when you're dugg. On the contrary sometimes The Digg effect can have killed a site in the first six hours.
If you are able to convert your incoming readers from Digg into regular readers you then have a unique opportunity to get repeat appearances on Digg again.
The actual traffic from digg is a nice (but short lived) thing - but the real benefit of being dugg regularly is the increase in traffic from loyal readers (RSS, bookmarks and newsletters) as well as the benefits of new incoming links.
Some ways to improve your chances of being digg-itized.Style of Writing
While many hundreds of pages get to the top of the digg pile every week and there is quite a variation in their style - many of them do tend to have similarities. They are often lists and are usually easily digestible pieces that appeal to a skeptical yet reasonably knowledgeable audience. I don't know their demographics but I suspect it's largely a young male audience so your writing needs to be appeal to them. This includes code monkeys like me.
Topic of Writing
Digg has recently broadened the topics that it covers, however it's roots are technology based.
Titles and first lines are Important
I find that in most cases that people who submit posts to Digg re-use the same title or atleast something close to it. In many cases they also use the first line or two of the post as the description.
Quality Content
Ultimately Digg users (like most web users) like quality, useful and unique content. They get frustrated with second rate writing, lots of mistakes, recycled stories and sub standard site design.
Posted by Nikhil on Saturday, 6th January 2007 in TechnoBabble | Humour | Fun | Nonsense