Basic Tutorial for Social Marketing with Digg

If you’ve at least dabbled in social media you have no doubt heard of Digg. This site is the most popular of the social voting category of sites, boasting an Alexa Rank of 168, and is a darling of the Web 2.0 movement. The site, founded by entrepreneur Kevin Rose in 2004, has nearly tripled its number of registered users in the last year and currently boasts close to three million users. Although these numbers pale in comparison to megaliths such as Myspace, Digg offers marketers a large amount of traffic in specialized demographics, in addition to the benefits than be derived from having a high PR link.

I Digg It (In Case You Haven’t Before)

Digg revolves around the traditional social voting scheme as I laid out in my first post. Under this model users submit a link to content (articles, videos, photos) that is then placed in an “Upcoming” queue page. Users viewing this page then vote on links that they deem newsworthy. Links that receive more votes, or “Diggs”, then move to the front page of the site, reaching an exponentially larger audience. If a link becomes one of the most popular on the site for the day it is placed in a special sidebar where it usually remains for the course of a full day.

Why Digg?

Digg can be useful in a digital marketing strategy for a number of reasons. For those simply looking to spread content and increase Pageviews Digg can be indispensable, with most sites reporting 25,000 pageviews on a day that they reach the homepage. This can help if your site generates revenue via AdSense or a similar advertising program, although some people find that Digg users don’t click ads and provide an unwanted strain on resources.

My favorite use of Digg pertains to the search engine optimization side of the spectrum. Usually my client’s content is far from what Digg users would find appealing, but Digg can still provide some very real benefits. Search engines, especially Google, seem to be relying on social media sites to point toward quality content. Because users are allowed to vote on the best content this serves as an easy way to filter out poor content. In the next section we’ll learn how to use Digg to get an instant boost in the search rankings.

Digg and SEO

Here’s what you’re going to need to make Digg work for you:

• A Digg Account (really easy, takes less than 5 minutes)
• The URL of the content you want to link to
• The keyword phrase that you would like to rank for. For example, if you want people searching to Google to see your site when they search for “wooden widgets” this would be your phrase.

Hit the “Submit Link” on the top right of the screen. In the next screen you’ll enter your URL as well as the type of content you’ve found, whether it is an article, video or picture. I’ll go ahead and say that one of our goals in this tutorial is to keep our link on one of Digg’s top pages as long as possible. Selecting your article type can make a very big difference in this. The majority of submissions to Digg are articles, thus the articles section has a very high turnover of links. In my experience the video section moves the slowest, but play around with selecting different content types to find what works for you.

The next page is the most important of the submission process. Here you’re going to put your keyword phrase that you selected earlier into the “Title” submission field. It doesn’t have to be your exact phrase; for the example I gave above a title like “Find Wooden Widgets Online” would serve our purpose just as well. Be creative. For your description enter a short description of your site, but be sure to reiterate your keywords as well as a good sales pitch to get users to click (although it won’t matter if they don’t). Don’t get carried away with your title and description, though, as Digg users are often apt to flag spam and advertisements as such.

The thumbnail in the next step doesn’t matter so select any one you would like. Be especially careful in the next “choosing a topic” section. As I mentioned before, our goal here is to make our link stay on a front page of Digg as long as possible. Be as specific as possible when selecting your category, but also pay attention to the amount of traffic each one receives. From the Digg homepage you can select different topics on the top navigation menu to view the front page for that topic and then view new stories by clicking the button at the top right labeled “upcoming”. Now might be a good time to research the activity of a few topics where you could paste your story. For example, I usually have good results with my hockey sites by posting them to the hockey subsection. This category receives little normal activity and thus a link will stay on the upcoming hockey page for twelve hours at a stretch. Once you have selected your category enter the code at the bottom and follow the rest of the pages to complete your story upload.

After all that you may be wondering why we want to stay on a page as long as possible. That’s where Google Pagerank comes in. Say that we went through the steps above for a hockey article. After submitting the link it will appear on the general upcoming article page as well as an upcoming hockey page. The general page has a Pagerank of 7 (woo!) and the hockey page is a Pagnerank 5 (still awesome!). Our link won’t stay on the general page for very long because so many articles are submitted, so Google probably won’t see our PR7 link before it disappears. Our link on the hockey page, however, won’t disappear as fast because there aren’t as many hockey articles being submitted. Chances are if we stay here for at least half an hour Google will pick our link up and give us credit for such an authoritative link. This holds true for any category that you may submit to. If your content is really popular and gets enough Diggs it will move onto the “Popular” page for that category and then onto the front page of the entire website. These links can often be in the PR range of 5-7, with the front page being a PR 8 link that Google will credit you for.

The Results

After Google picks up your high PR link from Digg the results can be quite dramatic. When a user searches the keyword phrase that you placed in the title your site will be included in the results. Your individual mileage may vary with where you place in these results, but I’ve seen Digg links temporarily propel some of my pages that were previously on the third page to the number one result. The effect generally loses steam after a few days and your ranking will begin to slip, but the temporary effect is very noticeable and will also contribute to longterm positioning.

Not only will your site rank higher for your selected keyword phrase, but Digg also provides another link in the Google search results where others can find your site. A link is created to the content’s entry page on Digg and this link will often place high in search results as well because of Digg’s authority. In my experience these links will linger around the second page for a less competitive search phrase, sometimes permanently ranking higher than your site’s initial ranking ever was!

In Conclusion

So there you go! In less than ten minutes you’ve submitted your site to Digg for others to see and vote on while instantly boosting your rank in Google’s search results. This trick can be used numerous times to target different keywords and phrases, but be careful doing this as the Digg community is often quick to catch blatant seo tactics and spamming. Try experimenting with different categories and keyword phrases to find what works best for you and have fun with your new toy.

Check back next week when I’ll be discussing the site StumbleUpon.

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