Front Page On Digg Feels Good!
By Gerard McGarry on 6th May 2007, filed in Social Networking. You can leave a response below. Tags: Digg, Social Bookmarking
I came back to my computer this evening to discover two stories that I submitted to Digg have made the front page! Guess what? They weren’t even mine!
Nope, I’ve been practising what I preached the other day about social bookmarking and ethics. I was browsing through Google Reader and came across a couple of outstanding articles. One was a short tutorial on how to jazz up your screenshots by master designer Dave Shea. The other was Elliott Back’s in-depth post about the poor service provided by hosting company Dreamhost. I actually wrote about this on another blog some time ago, and my experiences were somewhat the same as Elliott’s. I felt instant sympathy and submitted the post to Digg.
What I Did Differently
I’ve been seeding other people’s pages to Digg for a few weeks now, as well as the odd page of my own that I feel is relevant.
My approach was to not use the original title of each post. Dave Shea’s for instance was ‘Simulacrum’. Simula-what? Nope, I changed the title to “Getting Skewed Perspective Screenshots With Photoshop“, which better described the content and gave an implied benefit to the reader. It’s had almost 1,000 Diggs at the time of writing.
For the Dreamhost post, I posed the question “Just Exactly How Bad Does Dreamhost Suck? Read this to find out!” The original title was “Dreamhost Sucks at Hosting”. It was to the point, yes, but I wanted to draw people in a bit more. I rephrased the title as a question and finished with a call to action, “Read this to find out!”. Dreamhost always sparks passionate debate anyway. They have a core base of loyal users, but an equally impassioned base of former customers who have been let down by the company in recent years. This post has had almost 1,400 Diggs, and 170 comments on the Digg page.
The best bit, for me, is that neither post was written as linkbait. Perhaps that’s the biggest difference?
Why Digging Feels Good
Getting two submissions to the Digg front page felt great, especially as I didn’t have particularly high hopes of success. And because neither was a site of mine, I wasn’t constantly checking stats to see the progress. Here’s why it felt so good:
- I’m glad to have given two good posts a hit of traffic they might not otherwise have received. I’ve read Dave Shea’s writing for a couple of years now. He introduced me to Standards-based web design, so I feel in a way like I’ve finally given something back (hi Dave!). Elliott’s post about Dreamhost is an issue that needs serious attention – I’m glad to have helped spread the word.
- I’ve helped other people to find resources of benefit. Perhaps someone considering web hosting for a new site, or maybe a designer looking to achieve that skewed screenshot effect.
- I’ve boosted my credibility on Digg (yay!) and proven myself as an information broker. I regularly come across fantastic resources, so Digging them helps spread the word. The more people get benefit from those resources, the better a source I become. In fact, my Digg account now seems to have twice the ‘friends’ it did before. Hopefully people will like my submissions and perhaps they’ll be a bit more popular in future.
And it’s nice to know that when a link I’ve seeded gets popular I’ve passed on the benefits of social bookmarking -increased RSS subscribers, backlinks, PageRank, etc.Plus, it’s great to be able to practice linkbaiting on someone else’s content! If you’ve been playing with linkbaiting on social bookmarking sites, I’d love to hear your experiences in the comments.
