The Popularity Site That Changing How Content is Searched

Author: Wong Chendong

Do you Digg? Have you been Dugg? If not, you are missing one of the best ways to drive traffic to your site. In case you don't know, Digg.com is a community-based popularity website. You submit articles, blog post, videos, pictures and if the community likes them then they digg it. Digg.com combines social bookmarking, blogging and syndication with a form of non-hierarchical, democratic editorial control.

News stories and websites are submitted by user and then promoted to the front page through a user-based ranking system. You see, this differs from hierarchical editorial system that many other news websites employ. Readers can view all of the stories that have been submitted by fellow user in the "Digg/News/Upcoming" section of the site. Once a story has received enough "diggs" it appears on their front page.

Should the story not receive enough diggs, or if enough user report a problem with the submission, the story will remain in the "digg all" area, where it may eventually be removed.

What Digg Can Do

Do you know the power of Digg? Well, to be honest with you, if you were like me you had no ideal what digg could do for driving traffic. But since I got into digg I have came across web servers that have crushed because they couldn't handle the amount of traffic going to them.

I know you might ask why you would want to crash your web server with a lot of traffic. Well for two main reason:

1. This is free, targeted traffic user who will buy from you, click on your affiliate links, click on your Google Adsense, and if they like your site, they even can link to you.
2. Digg gives you great links back to your site that can help rankings in search engines.

There are many more sites that do the same thing as Digg.com. Some of them are Propeller, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, SocialPoster and ReddIt.

You see, not only are these great places to get your articles, blog posts and any other information that you have out to the public but they are a great place to get information. The articles that you can find at Digg.com or one of the other sites that I have list above are important for a number of reasons:

1. You can find information that helps or entertains you.
2. There is a lot of information that could help your company or make your job easier.
3. You can find out what your competitors are doing. This is important because you can see what is working or not working for them, create your own version and fill in any gaps they missed.

How To Become Part Of Digg

There are couple of ways that you can submit items into Digg or the other websites. First, you can do it the long and hard way by hand:

* Step 1 : This includes going to Digg.com or one of the listed sites I mention above.
* Step 2 : Create an account if you do not already have one.
* Step 3 : Login.
* Step4 : Click on submit new.
* Step 5 : Fill out the URL line.
* Step 6 : Give it a title.
* Step 7 : Give it a description.
* Step 8 : Choose the most appropriate topic from the list.
* Step 9 : Fill out the CAPTCHA (The letters is a picture to keep spammers out).
* Step 10 : You will see a preview of your story.
* Step 11: Submit your story.

To be honest with you, that is a lot of work. So if you already have a blog or a website you can more than likely install digg plug-in that helps make this faster and allows other people to Digg your content on your site. Then you can fellow this steps:

* Step 1 : You then click on the icon and it will take you to digg.
* Step 2 : If you are not already logged in it will ask for your username or password.
* Step 3 : It will already have the URL, the title, and the Description filled in for you. Now all you have to do is review them.
* Step 4 : Choose the most appropriate topic.
* Step 5 : Fill out the CAPTCHA.
* Step 6 : You will see a preview of your story.
* Step 7 : Submit your story.

You see, there are a couple of tools out there that will allow you to submit to more then one site but I've never used any that have worked that well. The more people that digg your content the more digg numbers goes up. This lets you know how popular that content is and makes you visible to other Digg user.

Use Digg To Drive Targeted Traffic

Now that you know how to use digg to promote your content and get so much traffic to your website that it can crash your web server what do you want to promote? You will want to promote content that is eye-catching and interesting to a large audience, not just every piece of content that you create.
Some basic rules for adding content are listed below:

* If it already is in digg, do not put it in again. If you think about it, if everyone who read one of your blog posts and then put it into Digg as a new item, you would have thousands of items in digg about the same blog post.
* Just because you can, does not mean you should. Not only is this a good rule for Digg but I think it is a great rule for life.

Now that you are adding content, reading content and adding comments it's time that you make some friends. To be honest with you, Digg can be a great place to network and find people who are doing the same things that you are. Digg also allows you to have favorites and a history of your activity so you can go back and find your favorite articles.You see, I hate it when I find something great that I want to share with someone and I cannot find it two days later. So Digg's history has saved my butt many times.

When you have friends on Digg you can also see their activity to see what they have been reading. I like this because it makes it easier to find more content that I would be interested in because someone else has done the footwork for me.

Now I warn you. Digg and other sites like it can get addicting. To be honest with you, I know that if I could I would spend most of my day reading all of the new content that is constantly being updated on digg. If you want to, you can get links to many sites just like Digg on your blog so that your user can spread your content around.

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