Using Digg To Enhance Your Online Success

As a blogger, I know it’s important for me to keep abreast of technologies which can support me in making my blog more effective. A number of people have been getting in touch with me recently asking how to best use Digg to promote their blog, so I thought I’d take a few moments to give you an overview of Digg, and how to best use it to make the most of your blog.

This is a follow-up to my previous post of Do Your Digg It?

A good scenario for any blogger is to have a lot of hits, a number of subscribers, and a huge amount of comments and feedback. To achieve the maximum success in terms of these measurable benefits, it’s worth harnessing the power of Digg to lend weight to your online marketing.

What exactly is Digg?

Digg describes itself as “a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users.” In essence, Digg is an online popularity contest for good web content. If someone likes a news item or article that has been published anywhere online, they can rate it on Digg and share it with other online readers.

The more people that ‘Digg’ an article (rate it positively), the more popular the article gets. This means that hitting the front page of the Digg popularity rankings could potentially bring you and your blog a phenomenal amount of exposure and traffic.

How to use Digg to your blog’s advantage

• Use Digg as an enhanced RSS feed, which keeps you updated every minute about what is going on, online. Find trends, and match them on your own site to increase traffic.
• Get ideas from articles on Digg when it comes to generating your blog articles. You can then share them on other platforms.
• Connect with people through Digg, by identifying networks which share the same interest as you. If people rate your article on Digg, take a moment to find out who they are, check out their site and see if there is anything you can do in return.
• Put some of your more important links on Digg, and add friends so they can make the most of the page as a hub for your business information.
• Advertise your articles, once in a while. If you do this too often, you risk being dismissed as a spammer on the site, but it doesn’t hurt now and then to Digg your own writing.

If used well, Digg can really help you as a blogger both through the site itself, and search engines that pull up highly-ranked Digg articles. By writing a snappy headline, producing high-quality articles and carefully selecting keywords, you can start to make Digg work for you. Ask friends and colleagues to Digg on your behalf, and also make the most of social sites such as Twitter and Plurk to promote your content. When used effectively, the site can bring you more readers, more connections, and higher online visibility.

Further reading: How To Get A Story To The Digg Front Page.