January 11, 2008
Using Digg to Build Traffic and Links
Digg is a social bookmarking site. It is currently one of the biggest and most popular bookmarking sites around, and can be utilized to generate spikes of untargeted-traffic (which by the way isn't going to do you a whole lot of good), but more importantly, quality one way links.

There are a couple things you should think about before jumping into digg. Realize that this is a social bookmarking site, and people will digg things just because they are 'cool'. If you're selling monetizing with your site, chances are that if you get to the first page on digg and get a traffic spike, the visitors are just going to glance around quickly and then leave. They're there to look, not to convert into customers or click ads. That being said, who doesn't like traffic spikes? I mean hey, they make you feel like you're doing something, right? And of course, getting spread virully through digg may be just the thing you're looking for… publicity.
1. Signing Up
The first step, as with pretty much any social site around, is to set up an account. This is a simple ordeal with digg. Just look at the top lefthand corner of the digg homepage, and you should see a 'Join Digg' button. Click through and fill out the info.
2. Digging A Webpage
This is also pretty simple. If you are signed into your account, look at the top of the page, and you'll see a bar with a couple options, the second-to-last being 'Submit New'. Click on this option.

You should now be on a page where you submit the URL of the article or site you want to digg. To make sure I get the correct URL, I usually like to open up the page in a new tab and copy/paste the URL into the box. But it's quite fine if you want to type it out as well.

The rest is pretty simple. If your article or webpage has not already been submitted to digg, it will open up a new page. Here you enter in a Title and Description. You choose a thumbnail icon. You choose the category which your article will be under. And Last, you type in one of those really annoying 'Are you human?' things (one of the ones that's even more annoying because it's not words, and it's case-sensitive). All that is pretty self-explanatory I think. No images needed here.
3. Some Thoughts and Notes on Digg
Like I said before, you probably aren't going to get highly targeted traffic if you're page gets a lot of diggs and makes it to the first page. But there are a couple of other really good benefits from digg.
(1) Publicity. Just getting people familiar with you and your site. If you can somehow get people talking about your site, that's good. The more known you are the better. And hey, you might just want readers for your blog. This is a great way to get a whole bunch of people to read a really good blog post you wrote.
(2) Blog traffic and links. A lot of times, people will write blog posts about things that get onto the first page of digg. They might review the site, or just randomly write what comes across their mind, or if the article is interesting enough, they might just want to tell the people who read their blog about it. This works two goods for you. It will give you free one-way links (always good), and it might even get you direct traffic from the blog.
(3) SEO. If you get popular within a major social site like digg, it is a HUGE boost to your search engine rankings. All the internal links and stuff that go on inside of these giant social sites… search engine heaven. This is another great reason to do social sites like digg, because they will greatly increase your authority in the search engines. And everyone knows that good search engine rankings are a one-way ticket to more traffic.
I think that about does it for digg… Oh, one last thing.
4. Adding a 'Digg This' Button to Your Blog Post or Website
You can add a 'Digg This' button to your site. If a user is signed into digg, and they view your webpage, you can put up a button they can click to digg your article. This will GREATLY increase the number of people who digg your stuff (if any do it in the first place), because who wants to spend a whole minute to go out of their way and digg an article? But if there's a button right at the bottom of the post, then it'll be much easier, and your chances of getting a digg will go up greatly.
To set up the button, go to your profile page and scroll all the way to the bottom. There are little boxes of information here. From left to right, go to the third box entitled 'Digg Tools & API', and click on 'DIGG TOOLS'.

You should see a couple of options on the next page. Click the one called 'Integrating Digg in Your Site'.
Once the next page has loaded, you should see a box with some code in it (There will probably be a few, you can read about the more complicated ones if you want, or just take the first one, which is the simplest). Take this code and post it where you want the button. This may be in teh HTML of your blog post, or in the HTML of the template, or even somewhere else. If you want to see what one of the buttons looks like, just look at the bottom of this post, where I put one.
That about wraps it up for digg. Again, if anyone has any questions, feel free to post a comment, and I will see if I'm able to address them.



