Digg, as you know is one of the leading social media sites. It attracts reams of visitors each day and a popular story can cause a surge of visitors to a website that can sometimes crash the web server. This is known as the ‘Digg Effect’.

Somewhere along the line, an open source clone of Digg appeared called Pligg. Pligg allows you to set up your own Digg-like website. Ohhh, instant riches! Fame and glory in your little web community. Not to mention the babes you’ll attract…

Community Building Takes Work. Hard Work.

Building an online community is not an easy task. If you’ve got the dollar signs in your eyes and you want to make fast money, a Digg clone is not for you. You’ve got to:

• Choose a niche. There are already a ton of dominant social media sites. You’ll never overtake Digg using clone software. Logic dictates that you’re better off choosing a niche and focussing on that. Add value to your site by linking to valuable resources.
• Design and brand the site – look too much like Digg, and you’ll look like a cheap imitation. If they wanted Digg, they’ve gone there.
• You’ll need to promote the site. That means advertising dollars and other types of promotion around the niche you’ve chosen.
• You need to build a user base. Or were you planning to be the sole contributor to the site? You can only find and link to so much content on your own. It’s the community element that makes these sites work.

All this is leading to an excellent post over on Upstart Blogger about the myths surrounding setting up and running a Pligg site. If your thirst to be the next Kevin Rose is close to insatiable, you might want to read this first. It won’t happen overnight.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

Smart webmasters know that by getting their sites listed on the ‘popular’ lists means a major influx of traffic, which can result in:

• Increases in RSS subscribers. A number of sites have documented a rise in subscribers after a post becomes popular on a social media site.
• Increased links back to your site. Many bloggers find things to write about on social media sites. If you’re popular, expect lots of nice links back from other blogs.
• Google Juice. The increased backlinks will ultimately result in better PageRank with Google and therefore higher placement in search engine listings.
• Reputation. As all these factors come into play, your site has the potential to become a trusted resource and this can all reinforce your reputation as an expert in your niche.
• Better advertising revenue. Maybe not immediately – social media users are an ad-blind crowd. But increased traffic and better SERP placement is likely to see better advertising opportunities over time.

As you can see, there is a lot to gain from leveraging social media sites. Note that I didn’t say ‘exploiting’ social media sites.

Seeding

Seeding is the practice of submitting links to social media and bookmarking services like Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Reddit. There are countless others, although the impact of seeding is less if the service is less popular. Which explains why attaining the Digg front page is the goal for many bloggers!

Seeding becomes controversial when you’re only promoting your own site, or you’re seen to be submitting stuff purely to gain traffic. This is frowned upon by the users and moderators of social bookmarking services for a very good reason – it’s considered to be spamming. And everybody hates spammers.

The only exception to this rule is if you’re creating quality content and otherwise participating in the community. If you’ve created a unique article or post that will offer real value to visitors, then there’s nothing wrong with seeding your own pages. Nicer if someone else submits it for you though.

My Suggestions For Ethical Bookmarking

• Limit your activity. Not all social networking services will yield a result, and some are barely used at all. Why waste time with multiple submissions – you could be creating great content!
• Participate in the community. There’s a reason they call it Social Bookmarking – it’s all about people and connections. Find people with similar interests, comment where you can and build a solid friend list. You might actually enjoy it…
• Don’t just seed your own stuff. Share the resources you find interesting, particularly in your niche. It’ll vary your submission list and it’s a great way to reward other bloggers whose writing you admire. If you only seed your own stuff, you’ll look like a spammer.
• Be inspired by the community. Lots of bloggers get their inspiration from their social bookmarking tool of choice. They can also discover great writing in their area that they might never have found before. All this can generate ideas for you to write about and experiments to try on your own website.
• Above all, don’t spam. Not every post is worth submitting to a social bookmarking service. Shorter posts, or link posts that point out a resource but don’t offer any real insight are examples of this.
• Hope that people start to seed your pages. The Holy Grail of Ethical Bookmarking – in my opinion – is when people start watching your blog or website and seed your links for you. Word of mouth is better than self-promotion any day of the week!
• Seed other people’s pages. Reward websites and writers that you enjoy by bookmarking their work. It’ll give them all the benefits listed above, and your Digg account won’t look quite so spammy!

Start Your Ethics Engines

Creating an account on every social bookmarking service available is counter productive, spammy and a waste of time. I believe that you’ll really only see benefits from social bookmarking if you’re participating in the community. That means seeding other people’s pages, commenting on posts and building up a network of friends.

Also, by focussing on one or two particular sites, you stand a greater chance of success with your bookmarking. And it’s long accepted knowledge that when you become popular at one site, it won’t be long before your content gets seeded to other bookmarking services. For instance, if you hit the front page of Digg, you stand a shot at getting popular on del.icio.us or reddit.

Self-promotion fuels hostility in social bookmarking users. Do it too much and you can expect a backlash. Let’s push to drop mercenary linkbaiting in favour of participation and fair use of social bookmarking services.