EggRage.co.uk

For many people in SEO, and many others who are just hardcore digg addicts; the prospect of getting one of your submissions to hit the front page of digg is sweeter than a new-born antilope covered in syrup. After 4 months or so of using digg, I finally got my first one popular, and by some margin too.

Digg, for those who don’t know, is a ‘current events’ site which is very much like any other news site you might see on the internet. The difference of course is that it isn’t just any old news site, on Digg the stories voted either for or against by the users of the site, so the homepage news is always what the most people have voted for. Think of it like a very big democracy thats only a LITTLE bit corrupt, that sometimes succeeds but generally just flails about wildly, like an online version of George Bush, but without the support staff. More on the ins and outs of digg and other Social Media sites in another post.

So, when I first set myself up on Digg, it was primarily for link building purposes, to establish new links coming back to the site which I was optimising, and as such build the site’s inbound link campaign, etc. Soon however, I realised that Digg isnt just any old social media site. There are hundreds of sites LIKE Digg that try and use the same sort of marketing model, but 90% of them fail completely. There are hundreds and hundreds of submissions every day, but no one ever reads them, and they are pretty much just big sites with a whole lot of links. This is where Digg comes into its own, being the age that it is, Digg has established an actual community, a large group of members who talk to eachother and talk about Digg - this makes the site more inviting for new members to join and participate in the ongoing user activity, rather than just hit submit and click off the site. So Digg, actually gets traffic through its submission, and we’re talking a LOT of traffic.

Recently, a colleague wrote an article for his own site - discussing an important SEO technique and pointing out the pros and cons of overcoming certain issues relating to it. Once he’d finished writing this article, he went to hit submit on Digg, but rather than just pasting in the same title he’d used on the blog, we sat down for 5 minutes and discussed what the most ‘clickable’ title would be for the post, and went with that. By the time we left the office for the day, the story was on 53diggs, which wasn’t bad at the time. The next morning when we returned however, we found the same submission on over 500diggs and sitting nicely on the front page of Tech Industry News. We later discovered that the traffic generated by Digg had crashed the server in the middle of the night, due to 23,000 unique visitors in the space of a few hours.

The article made the font page of Tech Industry News, but that was where it stopped and in the following days it gained another 50 diggs or so, before slowly sinking down into the rest of the long forgotten digg archives.

But this is where my inspiration was rather abruptly kicked into action. 23,000 unique visitors in 24 hours, and I felt like we’d only just scratched the surface.

The power of Social Media Marketing had suddenly become far more of a reality than the distant rumor that I had previously perceived it as.

Next time… How To: Get 3,000+ Diggs in 24 Hours

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