10 Rules for Digg Success from the Beatles

December 12, 2008
by James Lowery

1: All you need is Love

Seriously, all you need is love, love and hard work. Ok, the two things you need to be successful on Digg are Love and Hard Work – that and great content, obviously. Right then, the three things you need to do well on Digg are Love, Hard Work, and Great Content. I’ll start again…

2: Love me Do

Digg is a community, and to be a part of it you need to contribute. Find friends and help them out. Choose people who have interests in common with your goals. Look at the subjects that they Digg, consider how active they are, and become a fan of them. Be one of the first people to Digg and comment on their stories, as this will get you noticed, and encourage them to add you. Check out the list of top Diggers here to start building a network of friends. They appreciate help, and will support people who support them.

After a while, you start getting found by other people and develop a fan base. Make friends into fans so you can shout to them, and be polite – send new friends a note thanking them and offering to help if they need it.

3: Hard Day’s Night

Successful Diggers spend hours on the site and have high success rates because they work hard – sometimes as much as 8 Days a Week (sorry). They make comments that stand out, and Digg the most popular stories. They shout regularly when they have something worthwhile to share, and respond to other people with offers of help. Basically, they put in the work to get the benefits. Digg lots of quality stuff along with what your “friends” send you, keep your comment ratio to around 10% of your Diggs.

4: I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party

No, you effing well don’t! Be nice, and if you can’t be nice, be quiet. There is nothing more dispiriting to a person with low self esteem than a disparaging remark on a piece of content. Sure you might get kudos from other “cool” users for a dismissive “meh” or a nice big “FAIL”, but you will create just as much animosity as admiration. If you don’t like something, don’t Digg it.

5: Please Please Me

Your content is the most important part of the Digg puzzle, but this isn’t a “How to Write Great Digg Bait” piece, it’s about making that content popular but here’s a couple of tips to bear in mind whether you are writing an article, taking a photo, or making a video:

Produce something people will want to read
Produce something new
Produce something that others will want to share
Produce something Good

6: I Want to Tell You

Once you’ve got a network of friends, and made your submission to Digg, you need to share it. Digg calls this SHOUTING. When you’re using it to promote your stuff, bear in mind that popular Diggers get lots of shouts, so make yours stand out. I get around 150-200 shouts a day, and ignore most of them because either a) they’re spam; or b) they’re dull.

7: Bad Boy

Because Digg is popular, it gets spammed. Lots. Don’t breach the terms and conditions, because you’ll get both your account (and more importantly), your site banned forever. There are hundreds of T&Cs that you agreed to when you opened your account (you did read them didn’t you?) but here are three things to remember:

Can’t Buy me Love

Don’t do anything to artificially inflate the number of Diggs you’re getting for a piece of content. Buying Diggs undermines the system, and devalues it in the future. If your content isn’t good enough to get popular, it isn’t good enough to deserve links. Work harder.

She’s a Woman

You may think a sexist comment is funny but your clever post misogynistic irony is likely to be lost on any women reading (Joke. Really, JOKE.) and get your account banned.

Not a Second Time

Don’t repeatedly promote the same site. You’ll be marked as a spammer and the site will be banned forever.

8: Come and Get it

It may sound stupid, but it’s no good only using Digg to promote your Digg Content and not making an effort elsewhere. You need to make sure that any content on your site has other social bookmarking buttons on it. Submit a maximum of one story from a given domain yourself and then get other people to do it for you. Use Twitter or StumbleUpon to get some initial interest for an article and shout it to your friends when it gets picked up. There is more than one way to skin a cat.

9: Let it Be

Once an item has been submitted, and you’ve shouted it to your friends, leave it. Don’t spam people with multiple shouts or “reminders”. It will really hack them off and make them more likely to bury your story or report you for spamming than vote for you.

10: Getting Better

The first (and second, and third, and fourth…) submissions that you make to Digg might not go hot, but don’t let that bother you. Provided that the content you are putting out isn’t too self serving, and is of a consistently high standard you will get there eventually. The more stuff you submit, the more you will understand exactly what appeals most to other users and help you to get it right in the end.

There you go, 10 rules for getting popular on Digg according to the Beatles, and I didn’t mention “Dig it” once. D’oh.